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US Switches Air Traffic Control To New Computer System
coondoggie writes: The Federal Aviation Administration this week said it had completed the momentous replacement of the 40-year-old main computer systems that control air traffic in the US. Known as En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM), the system is expected to increase air traffic flow, improve automated navigation and strengthen aircraft conflict detection services, with the end result being increased safety and less flight congestion. The FAA said the Lockheed Martin-developed ERAM systems “uses nearly two million lines of computer code to process critical data for controllers, including aircraft identity, altitude, speed, and flight path. The system almost doubles the number of flights that can be tracked and displayed to controllers.”
Just off the top of my head, major limiting factors are runways to get the flights into and out of the air, passenger demand, and the number of air traffic controllers. And like most projects, the cost and effort to scale rises dramatically with the amount of scale you target. Besides, if the system is anything like the air traffic management system I worked on, then it should scale much better than the system it replaced.
The software on the plane has more lines of code than that and some of that code actually controls the plane, auto-negotiate collision avoidance, etc. I'd be more worried about that - if ERAM goes down for a brief period, controllers wouldn't be able to see flights, but those aircraft would be able to maintain control of their aircraft until ERAM came back up. If the flight's control system went, then the traffic controller would only be able to watch the flight as it hurtled out of control.
Tracking double the number of flights likely requires about 4x the about of computing power. A naive comparison grows at a rate of (n)(n-1)/2. You might be able to reduce that by not comparing aircraft that aren't going to be anywhere near each other (e.g. a plane in Washington D.C. cannot readily crash into a plane in Los Angeles, CA until they get close to halfway across the country), but still....
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I say this as a thirtysomething computer programmer, although I've also always been a minimalist: Given the choice between something that uses software and something that does not, go softbare.
My car, TV, and entire life are now filled with much more software than ever. Now that they can "do" more, they are also slower, flakier, and more complicated. And as a computer programmer, I know why: even the simplest program is amazingly complex. Every keystroke is a pitfall.
Two million lines? I think I'll drive --- no, just walk.
Lockmart is complicated. My division of Unisys was bought by the Carlyle group, which also bought IBM's Federal Systems division, combined the two, and sold the result to Loral. They stirred in some other fragments of defense contractors and sold the result to Lockheed. I'd left Unisys before they sold us, so was surprised to get a call from Lockheed asking why I wasn't drawing my pension. Those two shards of Unisys and IBM had some very good people in them, something I knew both from working in the Unisys group and overseeing the IBM group when I was at MITRE. I was in the Ada community starting with Strawman in the mid-70s. A fair amount of our language design was intended to overcome the failures of management by both DoD PHBs and contractor PHBs. Ultimately, military use of Ada faltered because of the desire of the defense industry to de-skill the programming task. They wanted to pay C++ coder salaries, not software engineer salaries. Ada survives in places that want to do highly-reliable, life-critical systems, increasingly in Europe rather than here.