Air Traffic Management Center Builds Upon CSC’s Experience, Expertise
 With more than 30 years of experience in air traffic management, CSC is an industry leader in the design, deployment and operation of complex air traffic systems. Building upon this experience, CSC’s Air Traffic Management Center of Excellence (ATM COE) provides worldwide support to the aviation community by offering a broad range of essential services from improving air safety to developing modern air traffic systems.
CSC started working with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1972, providing software support for the development of that agency’s sophisticated air traffic control and safety systems. Since then, CSC has been a prime contractor for the FAA on numerous programs and the ATM COE is an outgrowth of this long and successful relationship. The Center also leverages the experience CSC has gained working with U.S. government agencies such as NASA and the Department of Transportation. Boasting more than 650 employees, the Center’s four main laboratories are located in New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts and California.
Improving air traffic efficiency
The ATM Center of Excellence is active in developing improvements to today’s air traffic systems as well as exploring operational concepts for future systems. For example, flight delays are a major issue confronting the commercial aviation industry today and CSC and the FAA are working on solutions to tackle this challenge. ATM COE director Robert Beard says, "The Center is working on a broad range of systems. We are currently looking into transformational technologies to make air traffic management radically more efficient and to better utilize airspace." Beard says with the increased emphasis on safety in air traffic management, ATM COE labs play an essential role in testing new technology before it is put into an operational environment. The ATM COE leverages CSC’s technical expertise from a wide range of contracts as well as CSC’s extensive systems integration experience. As an example, Beard says the ATM COE is helping the FAA adapt net-centric technologies and service oriented architectures developed in support of the U.S. Department of Defense and in the commercial market. "These technologies have shown real promise for integrating legacy systems with new systems," he says. Beard says the Center successfully prototyped Web services technologies with network-enabled technologies to integrate FAA air traffic management systems with Department of Defense air defense systems, thus addressing airspace security risks more effectively. The ATM Center is also involved in advanced technology research in areas such as flight conformance monitoring, which is especially important in a region with stringent flight restrictions such as the Washington, D.C., area. CSC is working with four leading aerospace and defense companies on a program called Net Enabled Operations, which is examining ways to improve communication between U.S. aviation and security agencies during emergencies. (See the feature article, "Next Generation Air Safety System Taking Off.") The main focus of the Center is the design and development of systems for air traffic flow management, strategic planning, predictive modeling, and the simulation, testing and analysis of decision support tools. For example, the Center assisted NASA with the research and development of a scheduling tool called the Multi-Center Traffic Management Advisor (McTMA). This work involved creating new algorithms and implementing them into a prototype system, along with extensive lab testing. In 2005, the NASA-CSC McTMA team won the prestigious NASA Group Achievement Award, which honors outstanding accomplishments that contribute to NASA’s mission. Beard says the ATM COE specializes in applying the latest information technologies to air traffic management problems and in integrating recent technical innovations into legacy systems. The ATM COE is one of CSC’s 17 Centers of Excellence, which are certified by CSC’s Leading Edge Forum and are dedicated to the exploration and testing of state-of-the-art solutions, products, methodologies and concepts. Related Information: Contact us and let our experience help you produce results.
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