A distributed computing environment for ATC data analysis

ATC data exchange is taking on increasing importance in both operational and experimental contexts. The starting point of our work was dealing with different data formats between a variety of software. The problem of data exchange in simulation is complicated by the fact that in some experiments, real traffic is merged with simulated traffic, or simulation scenarios may change at a given time. This requires that the storage system be able to unambiguously distinguish between simulation parts. We present a distributed ATC database system that can be used to retrieve and process data that are spatio-temporal. The ability to specify areas of interest by means of a unified descriptor, the UEL (uniform event locator), allows the design of versatile ATM systems. Furthermore, since part of the project was the coding of a differential geometry library, many functions may be used for flight mechanics applications.