Development of datalink systems for air traffic management

The European pre-Operational dataLInk Applications (EOLIA) project was initiated to demonstrate the benefits of datalink operations to Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations in domestic airspace. At the beginning of the development cycle, Human Factors (HF) advice was sought, resulting in an initial assessment of benefits, statement of user requirements and suggested Human-Machine Interface (HMI). The implementation of the datalink system was thereafter led by software engineers, and their solutions were tested through three small-scale simulations. With each simulation, the system design incorporated new user comments, the result of which being a system that more closely matched the users' method of operations and provided tangible, not predicted, benefits to the Air Traffic Controller and aircraft. This paper reports the three-year process of gathering user requirements, developing a prototype system, and testing it through three simulations.