EFFICIENT UTILIZATION OF HW AND SW SYSTEMS IN ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initiated the mission to transition Traffic Management Advisor (TMA, also referred to as the "legacy" system) into a new system. The legacy system provided computer automation to enhance the arrival/departure throughput and efficiency of air traffic operations in extended terminal airspace surrounding major airports, and in en-route airspace. The resulting system re-architecture enhancement upgrades the system architecture to: reduce cost of ownership; reduce the logistical footprint; maintain compatibility of hardware and software; comply with system performance requirements; and to increase the flexibility of workstations. The solution proposed, developed, implemented and now in deployment the Time-Based Flow Management (TBFM) System. This system consolidated the servers resulting in a server footprint reduction of 70%. This approach had the lowest risk to the system from a hardware change perspective; however, it did have some inherent limitations and risks. The software needed to be tweaked to ensure performance was met on the consolidated server, which was more difficult as the number of airports adapted expanded, as more and more functionality is added to the system, and as additional subsystems are created outside of the standard TBFM software (i.e. SOA Enterprise Bus). Additionally, the new hardware must be installed at each site in a new rack, spares for those servers need to be allocated both locally and at the nationwide depot, and any future expansion hardware would need to be installed at each site. This white paper explores an innovative solution to meet the growing need envisaged for the expansion of the number of airports and increased functionality to the system. Performance capability at each site can be expanded in many ways. Traditional approaches favor using the same hardware and software configurations with faster and more efficient software running on more powerful hardware with high capability network performance. The simple minded yet most costly option would be to increase the performance capability at each site to meet the demand. However, making use of the emerging technologies of cloud computing where by the computing power is not site resident but provided as a computing service with the associated CPU, memory, storage, network and bandwidth available across all the sites. This minimizes maintenance across all sites and offers site-specific customization of applications to provide software efficacy. Yet another emerging technology used in the space system environment provides efficiency in speed and powered through off-loading compute intensive software on to silicon. However, in keeping with the paradigm of consolidating systems under a system-wide enterprise meeting the intent of the Next Generation of air traffic, it behooves us to be more creative and propose an innovative solution that would: 1. Minimize the cost of hardware, inter and intra communication links 2. Minimize the cost of software development 3. Maximize the capabilities of the inherent systems, data structures and processing capabilities 4. Embrace the next generation of data processing and information transfer methodologies