Positive outcome for ARTAS-MMS

EUROCONTROL has signed the "Certificate of Provisional Acceptance" that formalises the positive outcome of the project ARTAS-MMS, the redesign of one of the system components of ARTAS (ATM SuRveillance Tracker And Server) entrusted to Vitrociset following the award of the Open Tender Action published in 2009. ARTAS, developed and managed by EUROCONTROL is the European ATC (Air Traffic Control) tracker system designed to acquire data from different surveillance systems, providing accurate and consistent representation of the traffic on a well-defined geographic area and to distribute the relevant surveillance information to a community of user systems.

ARTAS, launched in 1991, has recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and is currently operating in 29 ATC control centres corresponding to the 17 countries participating in ECAC (European Civil Aviation Conference) to which are added 2 military centres and the Upper Area control centre of EUROCONTROL (UAC) located in Maastricht. As part of the ARTAS system, Vitrociset was entrusted with the redesign of the component MMS (Man Machine Interface and Supervision), one of the most critical since it deals with the configuration, the management and the control of the complex functionalities of the entire system.

Given the criticality of the environment in which the system is intended to operate, the project was carried out under SWAL3 (SoftWare Assurance Level 3) and in close and fruitful collaboration with the group CAMOS (Centralised ARTAS Maintenance and Operational Support) of EUROCONTROL. The goals achieved are the elimination of dependence on proprietary components with the adoption of open source solutions and the implementation of a new graphical user interface resulting from the requirements of the ARTAS community (composed by EUROCONTROL and the users of the system ARTAS) but especially from the decennial Company experience in the development of ATC consoles.

At the end of testing, EUROCONTROL and the ARTAS Users that were present expressed appreciation for the work done by Vitrociset and the beneficial results obtained.