Autore: sittadmin

It is a big honour for us to announce that SESAR approved the ANTICIPATE project to be eligible for being granted as an interesting Exploratory Research project (ER) under Grant Agreement 101166947. Six partners will be developing the project under the chairmanship of Miquel Àngel Piera Eroles:

1. Autonomous University of Barcelona (coordinator) – Spain
2. SITTI – Italy
3. Centro Italiano Ricerche Aerospaziali (CIRA) – Italy
4. Institute For Sustainable Society And Innovation (ISSN) – Italy
5. Technische Universität Braunschweig (TUBS) – Germany
6. Eurocontrol – Belgium

This is the first time SITTI is a prime actor in SESAR projects: till now the contribution of our company to SESAR projects has been through other companies like ENAV. About one year ago, SITTI was the coordinator of another proposed project, named COVER, which has been positively evaluated but not funded by SESAR due to budget limitations.

The basic idea behind ANTICIPATE (acronym for Absorb Nearby Tidy Identified Candidates for Ideal Parteking Available Extra-Capacity) is the identification of a set of aircrafts that can be delegated to an adjacent sector to balance the workload of controllers and better exploit the capacity of each sector, by transferring the competence of a given number of aircrafts from an overloaded sector to a less engaged one.

This shall be accomplished by also taking into consideration the trajectories of the aircrafts and other possible traffic limitations, while maintaining the minimum separation between aircrafts. This project differs from possibly correlated concepts such as Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) and Dynamic Airspace Sectorization (DAS) because the airspace is not “deformed” nor “reconfigured”, but the intended result is obtained by transferring a properly identified group of aircrafts from a controller to another, with temporary modification of the airspace structure.

From August 20 to 25, SITTI will be exposing at the Rimini Meeting, the annual event organized by the Communion and Liberation movement. This is the 45^th edition of this important event, whose importance in the cultural, political, religious and social fields is continuously growing: more than 700.000 persons are expected to visit the meeting this year.

The title chosen for the current edition raises a great challenge for us: ‘If we are not looking for the essential then, what are we looking for?’. The meeting in Rimini (https://www.meetingrimini.org/) is intended to show that all human aspects are strictly interconnected: society, economics, religion, work, finance all involve us as a whole and we have to think and follow what is really important to us, the essential.

ENAV and SITTI together showed how they contribute to the activities ruled by the Ministry for infrastructure and transport (MIT), by allowing visitors of all ages and all kind of backgrounds to understand how Air Traffic Control (ATC) works and is organized. Most visitors are not aware of what happens “behind the scenes” when they get on a plane and they get surprised when they start understanding how much technology is involved to guarantee they reach their destination safely and timely.

The ENAV-SITTI joint stand has been visited by the Ministry for infrastructure and transport, Mr. Matteo Salvini, who congratulated for the constant attention to passengers and the advanced technological achievements and future projects that are being implemented by the two companies.

SITTI is grateful for the opportunity it is having to reach the general public through the Meeting in Rimini, allowing visitors to appreciate the topmost level of technology applied to Air Traffic Control, developed by a fully Italian company.

Remote Towers are getting more and more popular in the ATC world, allowing the remote execution of all tasks usually performed by air traffic controllers operating from a tower located at the airport site. Today’s technology is in fact capable of making all required information available at a different site, where controllers access the same features that would be accessible in a conventional airport tower.

This makes a big difference because controllers are not asked to be physically on site, but they can work remotely in a so-called Remote Tower Control Centre (RTCC) from which a number of airports can be managed simultaneously from one location. Of course, this implies the capability of the involved systems to remote all their interfaces, to give operators the feeling of being physically sitting in the airport tower, even if they are hundreds of kilometres afar. Video streams caught by cameras of different kinds are displayed to provide an out-of-window view of the airport. Radio and telephone voice communication means is also made available remotely.

ENAV, the Italian ANSP, is in the process of building up a RTCC in Brindisi to gradually move the management of small to medium airports to this centralized facility. For the accomplishment of this task, SITTI has been asked to cooperate with the provision of a new MULTIFONO® M800IP® system to be used as the main VCS. These systems will be integrated with a data and voice recording and replay system (named VRS800S), also capable of recording ambient audio.

The new M800IP® Voice Communication System (VCS) will be equipped with a total of 48 new controller working positions (CWP), capable of seamlessly access analogue, digital and VoIP (Voice over IP) radio and telephone links through high level, top performing, touch screen panels. The emergency VCS will be complemented by another 15 CWPs and additional telephone and radio channels. All what above is accompanied by the VRS800S Voice Recording System, capable of simultaneously record more than 100 VoIP channels and 120 E1 channels, plus ambient audio.

ENAV and SITTI are together building up a modern remote control centre that will allow the Italian ANSP reducing operative costs, without renouncing to its high level standards of high reliability and safety to the benefit of all airlines and passengers.

The Italian Air Force (AM – Aeronautica Militare) has recently awarded SITTI the implementation of a geographical network connecting its main sites by use of the VoIP (Voice over IP) technology. The same network will be also used as the backbone for the Remote Instant Messaging service between operators located at different sites.

SITTI boasts a very solid and long-lasting strict relationship with AM that brought along the past decades at the installation of several VCS (Voice Communication Systems) in the airbases all over Italy. These systems are now going to be upgraded to be part of a large nation-wide standard network.

Dedicated so-called SCC/AM (Servizi Coordinamento e Controllo) centres are operating 24/7 to allow efficient and effective coordination between civil and military flights and to provide the air traffic control service in the military dedicated airspace. All these centres will now be connected to a nation-wide network, allowing direct connection on one side to the military control centres and on the other side to all military airfield towers.

The contract between the Air Force and SITTI envisages the installation or upgrade of MULTIFONO® M800IP® systems developed by SITTI, to allow VoIP communications in full adherence and compliance to the world renowned standard ED137. The new network architecture is not only allowing more efficient links between operators, but also dramatically reduces the amount of network resources needed: dedicated links are no longer needed as the bandwidth is only occupied while conversations are in place, thus giving the overall network a much greater throughput.

All what above is accomplished by server-based VCS systems of the M800IP® family, connected to the network via duplicated independent interfaces for reliability purposes and security reasons, thus fully isolating the local VCSs from the outer world, preventing possible unauthorized access.

“The implementation of such an important and large-scope project once more testifies the capability of SITTI to tackle challenging scenarios.” – Mr. Massimo Romata, SITTI Program Manager, stated – “This also applies to those clients for which security is of utmost importance, as for military purposes.”

Always very attentive to the evolutions in the field of voice handling, SITTI is actively participating in the EUROCAE WG122 working group devoted to the definition of virtual centres and all their implications on the services needed for an efficient, safe, effective management of the air traffic.

On May 21, ENAV hosted a WG122 meeting at their nice facilities in Rome Ciampino, during which several important aspects on virtual centres have been discussed. Many experts from different companies representing both ANSPs (Air Navigation Service Providers) and industry met to commence work on a new document “Virtual Centre – Guidelines for Implementation”.

SITTI was represented by its Innovation Manager, Roberto Weger, who described the framework of the contingency and delegation use cases related to the initial deployment of the virtual centre concept within ENAV.