ALTYS announces SAGA, for Collaborative Surface Traffic Management

ALTYS Technologies has unveiled SAGA to the international airport and ATC community during Airport Show in Dubai last May. SAGA is a turnkey solution for collaborative airport surface management that provides ATC and airport operators real-time visibility over airport surface and terminal area movements, as well as advanced statistics, reports, and alarms.

SAGA can be used either with an existing surveillance infrastructure or with ALTYS’s ASTRA ADS-B ground station and MLAT system.

SAGA provides a means to ensure safer airport operations through enhanced situational awareness – as well as heightened efficiency through better information-sharing among airport stakeholders. ALTYS developed SAGA in response to airports’ growing need to accommodate increased traffic flows despite infrastructure constraints.

Designed for use both by airside teams and strategic management, SAGA heightens users’ awareness over surface operations and provides quantitative performance indicators. SAGA allows users on airside operations teams to visually track aircraft – whether on the airport surface or in terminal area – as well as airside vehicles. The system’s interactive and collaborative web application allows a wide range of airport stakeholders to synchronously receive real-time updates and alarms, such as runway incursion, temporary exclusion zone incursion, and conflict risk alarms.

In addition to its real-time features for airside teams, SAGA boasts sophisticated analytics-generation capabilities in support to strategic management. The system provides operational monitoring and custom reports for in/off-block times, landing/take-off times, taxi in/out times, runway occupancy times, and airport segment utilization statistics – among others. SAGA’s KPIs help airport stakeholders come to informed decisions regarding challenging long-term operational situations, such as standard taxi route modifications and airport improvement projects. It also provides airport operators with an independent and reliable source of information to automatically generate timely and accurate airline invoices. 

SAGA incorporates a Data Fusion system to integrate surveillance data flows (ASTERIX format) from multiple airport surveillance sources: SMR, ADS-B, and MLAT. It additionally processes data from other systems such as ACARS and ATC data link communications. It is flexible to integrate with existing surveillance infrastructures, or ALTYS’s ADS-B ground stations and multilateration system.

 “We have worked closely with airport operators throughout the design and development process to best meet the end user’s needs and make SAGA as easy-to-use as possible,” says Patrick Rahmoune, Head of Monitoring and Data Engineering at ALTYS. “SAGA can be smoothly deployed at any airport Operational Control Center or Controller Working Position, and offers 24/7 web access over a secure server application. It is currently undergoing operational trials at a number of international and regional airports.”