A few months ago, Coflight Cloud Services became the first to publish its services in the SWIM Registry. These services are developed within the context of the Single European Sky, the SESAR programme and the Airspace Study Architecture. This registration in the SWIM registry is an important step for CCS, which required a strong involvement and significant investments from the teams. To this end, DSNA, ENAV and skyguide teams worked in conjunction with EUROCONTROL to ensure the implementation of the SWIM Technical Infrastructure.
Targeting interoperability
From the beginning, CCS has sought to favour interoperability in its service design and implementation. The two pillars for CCS interoperability are the adherence to SESAR Virtual Centre Service Definitions on one hand, and the compliance to SWIM requirements on the other hand.
Being SWIM-compliant imposes in particular to respect the SWIM requirements about the technical infrastructure to put in place, which is organised around a set of technical bindings composing the Yellow Profile.
Implementing the SWIM Yellow Profile
To implement the SWIM Yellow Profile, which is a specification that provides requirements for the implementation of technical infrastructure, DSNA and ENAV teams had to carry out two important steps. The first task was to check that the technical requirements of the SWIM Yellow Profile were globally compatible with CCS objectives and target architecture. The second task was to explore the selection of technical bindings prescribed by the SWIM Yellow Profile, and to decide which of them to implement.
Regarding the Service Interface binding, the choice was to implement the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Messaging binding, a highly capable, flexible and standardised protocol for the asynchronous exchange of information. As no specific data interchange format was imposed by this AMQP Messaging binding, it was decided to use Protocol Buffers, a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data, as it was deemed smaller, faster, and simpler than XML.
This AMQP Messaging binding usage can be illustrated as follows, where the component CCS SWIM Box play the role of, i.e. an intermediate layer exposing data from, and to, the Coflight FDP System, as a set of SWIM Services (which are registered into the SWIM Registry):
The chosen Network Interface binding was IPv4 Secure Unicast.
Assessing the compliance to SWIM Yellow Profile
Regarding the Interface bindings (i.e. Service Interface binding and Network binding), the self-assessed SWIM compliance is currently estimated to 90 to 100%. The requirements about the Infrastructure Capabilities (related to security, monitoring or recording) are being progressively taken on-board, as CCS progresses along the road.
Expected benefits
With the implementation of the SWIM Technical Infrastructure specification, CCS is able to exchange information based on mainstream standards and off-the-shelf software, where the exchange of information is secured thanks to the implementation of security protocols and best practices.
Combined with the use of services, defined thanks to SESAR Virtual Centre joint work of many partners, the use of SWIM TI allows CCS to suit various potential CCS Customers, with no need for specific technical accommodations and opportunities for wide and collaborative information sharing.