Security Situation Management: Towards Developing a Time-Critical Decision Making Capability for SESAR

This paper addresses dynamic security management in air navigation as a distributed collaborative agent problem and identifies a modelling approach for the implementation of a situation management capability in ATM. The traditional focus of aviation security is on preventive security aircraft and airport measures. When it comes to air navigation, the concept and scope of security is evolving. This goes in hand with the understanding and the implementation of security requirements and capabilities in new system developments. Security incident management is a research gap in the on-going transformation programmes SESAR and NextGen. This paper proposes an engineering concept for the development of a dynamic security incident management capability for the future ATM system context (e.g. SESAR) based on the findings of previous research and the associated development of a situation management framework model. The results obtained demonstrate the general applicability of the situation management modelling approach to the design and validation of such a dynamic security management capability as part of the recently launched EU project on Global ATM Security Management (GAMMA). A set of principal research requirements for this project is derived addressing the emerging need for security incident management capabilities in general, e.g. self-protection / resilience, emergency response. The proposed modelling approach and the anticipated GAMMA deliverables offer an opportunity to address the research gap of SESAR and provide novel technological solutions to the envisaged European Security Operation Centre recently proposed under the umbrella of the centralised services for European ATM.