Projects

The Contingency project was established by ENAV Headquarter in 2007.

The primary scope of the project was to assess the effectiveness and operational acceptability of some sectors configurations and procedures that were purposely designed to be applied in case of contingency and  to increase the resilience of the system.  

The project started from the consideration that the airspace controlled by each Area Control Centre (ACC) is divided into sectors, that can be split or collapsed depending on the traffic load. Each ACC has a plan of sectors opening or collapsing that allows to gradually pass from the minimum to the maximum sectors configuration and vice versa depending on the traffic load.

The Contingency project investigated the possibility to use the same plan to increase the resilience of the ATC system of Rome ACC. Starting from the minimum configuration of Rome ACC it studied the actual feasibility and operational acceptability of managing some of these sectors in multi sector planner modality, in order to cope with possible problems occurring in one of the desks and preventing from using it.  

In order to investigate this topic a validation process was arranged, in which the concept was explored, defined and finally assessed by means of four small scale real time carried out at Rome ACC. This activity was managed with the extensive cooperation of Rome ACC, ENAV CNS/ATM Experimental Centre and Deep Blue. Deep Blue in particular was responsible for the organisation of the Validation activities as well as for the Human Factors and Safety assessment. The CRIA© validation approach was applied in the project.

During the real time simulations the sectors of the minimum sectors configuration of Rome ACC were coupled according to a principle of geographical continuity and managed in multi sector planner modality. The desks used for the application of this procedure were working correctly. The contingency was in fact supposed to be the cause of the application of this procedure, not also to affect the desks used for its application.  

The four real time simulations produced positive and quite homogeneous results about the operational acceptability of the contingency configurations and their impact on capacity. They also allowed to define some requirements for the effective application of the contingency configurations.