Leidos and the Federal Aviation Administration are developing an information display system to provide real-time access to essential information about the weather, aeronautical and National Airspace System to air traffic controllers.
This common, National Airspace System (NAS)-wide Enterprise-Information Display System (E-IDS) will deliver timely, intuitive access to operationally significant information within a single system. E-IDS will assist air traffic personnel across the NAS with the goal of accessing information with two clicks or less.
This scalable, cloud-ready system will replace five legacy systems as part of the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) modernization project. E-IDS will transition from the legacy Information Display System (IDS) model to an enterprise-level model that provides air traffic controllers and managers everywhere with efficient access to a broader set of information.
The system will incrementally deploy across the NAS, with the first group of facilities going live in 2025.
Information display systems
Today, FAA facilities, including en route air route traffic control centers (ARTCCs), terminal radar approach control (TRACON) facilities, center radar approach control (CERAP) facilities and airport traffic control towers (ATCTs), use information display systems (IDS) in the NAS to provide personnel with information that supplements what is on their primary automation systems. These IDS's provide weather observations through airport surface weather sensors, information on runway status and visibility and static information such as airport diagrams, approach charts and facility directives.
This important data is used by air traffic controllers to help them perform their daily work. Information displayed on these systems is critical to air traffic controllers, the safety of air travelers and plays a prime role in achieving the FAA's overall mission.
Leidos’ role
Leidos teams are performing critical activities required to deliver the E-IDS, including: program management, systems engineering, design and development, system test and evaluation, training, production and site implementation.
Throughout the process of creating and implementing the new system, Leidos is continuously engaging with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), Professional Aviation Safety Specialists and various other stakeholders to define and refine the product that will best meet the needs of FAA's critical safety mission.
Why E-IDS?
The transition to a single enterprise IDS solution provides the FAA with both maintenance and logistics benefits, as well as NAS operational benefits. The five existing legacy systems are facing obsolescence and the maintenance of multiple system baselines is cost prohibitive. E-IDS will provide a single NAS baseline, simplifying maintenance operations for the FAA. The capabilities provided through E-IDS will enable national configuration management while still supporting local customizations, leading to common training resulting in long-term operations and maintenance cost savings.
Each of the five legacy systems support differing functionality and are unable to take advantage of FAA NextGen enhancements such as the integration of NAS Enterprise Services and System Wide Information Management (SWIM) enabled information services. The modern platform that E-IDS delivers will provide air traffic controllers with an adaptable, robust data navigation design and provide access to operationally critical information by leveraging FAA enterprise investments. Among the enterprise information are dynamic weather data, notices to airmen (NOTAMs) and pilot reports (PIREPs).
The E-IDS solution will implement a centralized, cloud-ready architecture while also leveraging current FAA investments in NAS enterprise infrastructure and services. The benefits include secure, timely display and correlation of relevant operational information from authoritative data sources via SWIM-based information services, such as NOTAMs, special activity airspace (SAA) schedules and status and weather information. Also included in the benefits are its capabilities for standardized entry and dissemination of PIREPs, cross-domain information sharing, efficient management and distribution of static information, consistent, easy-to-use filtering, sorting and searching capabilities and quick reference information. It also provides improved support for NAS contingency operations.
Leveraging FAA investments
E-IDS is designed to leverage several FAA investments and evolving capabilities: FAA Cloud Services (FCS), Enterprise Information Management (EIM) Data Platform, Integrated Enterprise Service Platform (IESP) and SWIM.
First, E-IDS will leverage the FCS E-IDS environment for two important elements – the software development environment and the data administrator (DA) application. Historically as programs start up hardware and software must be procured and installed in a laboratory to create a software development environment. For E-IDS, Leidos and the FAA made the decision to leverage both the FAA's cloud environment and enterprise software development tools to provision the software development environment, saving time and money. Additionally, the DA application used to define, configure and manage E-IDS display templates and operational configurations will be deployed and hosted on the FCS. This allows FAA data administrators the ability to access the E-IDS DA application through their already existing IT workstations, even at NAS facilities, eliminating the need for new hardware for these users at over 400 FAA facilities, yielding cost, space and energy savings for the FAA.
Next, the EIM Data Platform is an agency-wide initiative to provide a cloud-based system that offers reusable, information management services and big data processing capabilities for use across the agency. A key component to any information display system is access to the static data the user needs to perform his or her job. Legacy IDS systems had to gather all the necessary static data, some of which is nationally defined and generated outside of the local facility and other data is generated within the local facility. E-IDS seeks to simplify this effort by leveraging the EIM to gather national static data already present in EIM and providing a platform to contribute local static data from all facilities as a means to centralize the data repository. It also aims to significantly reduce the effort required to maintain a facility's static data.
The IESP is a virtualized computing environment at the FAA Network Enterprise Maintenance Center (NEMC). Rather than procure computing resources to run the E-IDS applications that provide the enterprise functions to all FAA NAS facilities, E-IDS applications will be installed on the IESP virtualized resources, forming the E-IDS National Data Center (NDC). The use of this platform supports the goal of developing a cloud-ready application for E-IDS that could eventually be migrated to a NAS-based FAA cloud service.
Finally, with the introduction of SWIM services, the FAA introduced a digital data sharing backbone within the NAS, enabling the use of modern web based technology to share information and avoiding the direct connection of two systems. E-IDS leverages national SWIM services at the NDC to then disseminate national dynamic data to all NAS and non-NAS operational facilities within the E-IDS enterprise. Leveraging SWIM services allows for modern, simplified data distribution architecture and data that legacy IDS's are unable to access.
Additional benefits
E-IDS is designed to operate in a variety of FAA environments. The operational NAS system functions in more than 400 FAA NAS facilities on physical hardware and the NDC at the FAA NEMC is hosted on the virtualized IESP environment. The DA application is accessible on the Mission Support Network, leveraging the FCS and the EIM Data Platform. Additionally, external entities such as the US Department of Defense, airlines and airport authorities use or interface with E-IDS.
The enterprise capability of the system will present many new features that will benefit air traffic personnel. Controllers across the NAS access information on a minute-by-minute basis to effectively perform their job function. This new system will give them what they need – right when they need it.
The system will enable controllers to share information across domains. For example, center controllers will have the ability to access data critical to the airport to which they're directing arrival traffic. They can then communicate this helpful information to pilots.
Flexibility
Since no system will ever be “one size fits all,” E-IDS presents a flexible option. Data administrators can customize display templates on their existing IT workstations by manipulating the platform tools. They can then push these new templates to the NAS operational E-IDS position displays, saving time in delivering changes required by the facilities for operational use.
Instead of being tailored to a specific region with expensive software customizations per site, E-IDS provides a system with national standardization, but still allows for local customization to support the unique operations of each facility where it will be used – without the need for software modifications.
E-IDS also allows the FAA to reduce the number of configurations in the NAS by creating a path for changes and improvements to a single platform, rather than having to maintain and improve multiple platforms. This provides the flexibility and bandwidth to make improvements more easily and frequently.
Safety impact
The E-IDS solution will help the FAA's Air Traffic Organization (ATO) address critical safety concerns. Two areas that E-IDS will help with are the distribution process of NOTAMs and PIREPs – both of which are vital to ensuring the safety of air travelers. Receiving timely and accurate information will help air traffic personnel more effectively eliminate risk for errors and expedite the reporting process.
Today, terminal air traffic controllers receive NOTAM information in several different modes, including electronic messages, calls and faxes and requires the controller to manually enter the information into the IDS. This is time consuming and error prone.
E-IDS seeks to provide an efficient and effective solution to disseminate and provide access to the right NOTAMs for operational personnel. E-IDS consumes NOTAM information through SWIM at the NDC and distributes information to relevant NAS facilities where E-IDS operational displays correlate NOTAM and other information for timely presentation to the user. E-IDS further provides quick access to relevant NOTAMs using key words and geographic information to filter and sort data.
Controllers are currently required to hand-write PIREPs on paper and pass them to an operations supervisor, flight data communications specialist or air traffic management coordinator who then manually inputs them into a system and coordinates with other personnel to distribute them to external stakeholders. The timing and accuracy of PIREPs is subject to workload and human error on input. As a result, low numbers of pilot reports are actually recorded and distributed properly.
E-IDS provides timely access to entered PIREPs and combats the input and dissemination issues too. The system will present the user with a touch-friendly pilot report entry interface that allows them to enter PIREPs directly into E-IDS while communicating directly with the pilot, improving efficiency.
The future
E-IDS is being developed in close partnership with the FAA to ensure that the new system meets the needs of the controllers and data administrators who use it daily, as well as the technicians and engineers who manage it.
The future is exciting when it comes to E-IDS, as air traffic personnel will have new opportunities to explore the benefits of the new system and also create new uses in real time.
Leidos’ FAA E-IDS paves the way for improving air traffic management operations for generations to come.