Surface Management

Surface Management System (SMS) is a decision support tool that increases shared situational awareness of airport surface operations between the ATCT, the Ramp Tower, air carriers, and various airport authorities and other ATC facilities. The software ingests and mosaics aircraft track and flight data from the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS), the airport ASDE-X surveillance feed, and airline gate management systems. The tool allows users to monitor aircraft in real-time and provides a variety of interactive charts, tables and local geographic displays, and includes a modeling capability through which users may project the impact of various hypothesized control actions. Additionally, SMS generates predicted beneficial advisories for control actions. Through this work, Metron Aviation has procured substantial surface domain knowledge and knowledge of the SMS software. Metron Aviation has live data feeds for testing SMS at our Herndon office, which can be used to test the system during the research and development process.

Product Features
Increases shared situational awareness on the airport surface Monitors aircraft in real-time Generates predicted beneficial advisories HITL simulations for surface traffic management

SMS has undergone an operational trial at the Memphis ATCT, TRACON, and Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC), and is currently running at various FedEx facilities at MEM, including the Ramp Tower, as well as the Northwest MEM operations bunker and Airline Operations Center in Minneapolis, and the UPS Ramp Communications Center (RCC) in Louisville (SDF). Additional simulation and evaluation efforts have been performed using SMS. At NASA Ames’ Future Flight Central tower cab simulator (FFC) operational ATC Specialists used SMS to conduct real-time, controller-in-the-loop simulations to support airport surface traffic management. A series of field trials were conducted at the Memphis airport in the ATC Tower Conference Room, FedEx Ramp Tower and Northwest Airlines’ ground operations bunker in October 2002, January 2003, and January 2004. An Operational Trial was conducted in September 2003 where Shadow-TMC used SMS and passed information to the on-position TMC in the ATC Tower, TRACON and ARTCC. Feedback from these events shows that SMS enhances situational awareness and provides efficiency improvements.

SMS GUI

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