Skyguide's Virtual Centre vision honored with SESAR SES Award for Service Oriented Architecture

During the last few years skyguide, Switzerland's Air Navigation Service Provider, has advanced with Switzerland's local single sky concept, the Virtual Centre Initiative. A Virtual Centre is the foundation for seamless, location-independent air traffic management. To allow setting up of the Virtual Centre, our technical systems are evolving to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), with no tight coupling, no point-to-point integration and no data duplication.

What started a few years ago as a revolutionary vision for the future of ATM in Europe has in the meantime evolved into a clear and concise initiative at skyguide which in the future could provide a blueprint for other ANSPs. The efforts in innovation pursued by skyguide have now been recognised and have allowed skyguide to receive one of the five Single European Sky Awards handed out yearly during the World ATM Congress in Madrid held from 7 to 9 March 2017.

In the presence of the EU Commissioner of Transport Violeta Bulc, Daniel Weder, CEO of skyguide, accepted the award on behalf of all skyguide employees and stated that: "SOA is at the core of the future collaboration between ANSPs and the whole aviation world and we are very proud to play a pioneering role in this endeavour.“

While this award comes at an early stage in the project, it sends a powerful signal that skyguide is on the right track. The award is a recognition not only of skyguide's vision but also of the work done by all skyguide as well as SkySoft employees having worked closely or remotely on this major achievement.

This year a total of 36 applications from 93 different entities were entered into competition for the SESAR Single European Sky Awards. In total skyguide won one single award, was part of another group award as member of a consortium and was mentioned in four other SESAR SES projects.