Flying the Open Source Skies: GIS in Air Traffic Management
Channel: Andrea Ross
Date: 16/03/2015

by Jeremy Lindsey

A case study of the development of the NAS Common Reference (NCR) system prototype, developed by Mosaic ATM, for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This presentation will outline the goals and challenges of the project, and how changing from commercial to open source GIS software improved development speed, application performance, and organizational positioning—for future work. It is believed that sharing the lessons learned from this project will benefit the FOSS4G community members, especially those working on similar projects.

The FAA developed requirements for the NCR system and selected the initial, commercial software platform on which Mosaic ATM was contracted to develop it. Using this commercial product, Web Feature Service (WFS) client and server applications were develop to meet initial needs. However, as the project progressed, several challenges were exposed. The commercial product required significant development time and support—often requiring patches. Licensing and deployment requirements caused significant technical hurdles. The tools obscured the underlying GIS technologies and limited developer efficiency. Closed, obfuscated core classes slowed debugging.

see more here:
https://2015.foss4g-na.org/session/flying-open-source-skies-gis-air-traffic-management