SOA-Based Aeronautical Service Integration

Over the past two decades, the air transport industry has experienced continuous growth. The demand for passenger air traffic is forecast to double the current level by about 2025 (European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation [EUROCONTROL], 2006). Smallto-medium sized low cost airlines in Europe such as EasyJet and Ryanair have observed a considerable percentage of passenger increase between 2008 and 2009 due to the growth in the number of regional airports and more choices offered on international destinations (EasyJet & Ryanair, 2009). To accommodate such growth and changes in new flight patterns and strategies, it is of paramount importance to ensure air transport communication systems around the globe be integrated to enable efficient air-to-ground and ground-to-ground communications for global air traffic management and coordination. Traditional approaches for aeronautical system integration in the past impose a high level of system dependencies; a fixed connection is required to be set up every time a new application is added. Therefore, aviation companies are facing continuous investment increase every time a new connection is established. This situation discourages enterprises from fulfilling grater business values by adding interior constraints; it restricts the number of applications and services that can be integrated into the existing IT infrastructure. In safety-critical systems in the aeronautical context, overloaded complex system structure will increase the chances of operational failures and jeopardise passenger safety. Therefore, it is important to devise a suitable architecture which minimises system dependencies and allows new applications to be integrated easily with the lowest IT maintenance budget. A layer-extensible blueprint in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is considered as a solution in this case for the integration of future aeronautical communication systems. The proposed framework should allow consistent data capturing and sharing among all end users who are involved in the global aircraft operations in the 2020 timeframe and beyond. In recent years, the SESAR SWIM (Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research System Wide Information Management) concept has reflected the emerging needs and willingness of Air Traffic Management (ATM) organisations in transforming proprietary ATM systems into a standardised and interoperable information pool in the pan-European aeronautical network. As the challenge still exists where the ATM stakeholders today do not want to deal with the complexity of the lower communication layers, SOA is considered as