Pulsar Consulting

MICA

In order to allow fluent airspace navigation, there is a need for aircrafts positioning. In this mindset, the state of the art radar standard is the MODE-S RADAR. This type of radar reduces the over-the-air communications pollutions by avoiding un-necessary ones thanks to an interrogation code mechanism.

In this mechanism, each radar should be assigned an interrogation code unique in its coverage area. Once an airplane is locked by a radar on a particular code, it will only respond its addressed directly calls. The Mica web application helps the EUROCONTROL Mica cell attributing the interrogator codes to Radar Operators accross Europe.

Technologies

Java
Struts
Spring
ExtJS 1.1
iReport
Hibernate
Oracle 10G

Application Scope

When an organization decides to install a new Radar, the national Focal Point is in charge of contacting the EUROCONTROL Mica cell to get an interrogation code. This process begins by an application where the focal point enters the information related to the new radar with some requests:

The first date of transmission
The type of code (II or SI)
The coverage range
…

Once this application is validated between the focal point and the organization’s operators, it is transmitted to the Mica administrator for processing. The Mica administrator will consider all the existing and requested radar and find a way to allocate an interrogation code to each of them without conflicts.

Once a solution comes up, proposal allocations will be created. The focal points will then have to accept (or not) the proposed code allocations. Other focal points can add objections to other’s allocations. These objection can (it is not mandatory) be taken into account by the Mica administrator. Once this process is performed, the organizations’ operators can implement the new allocations in the radar.

Business Flow

Main Concepts

The Home Page of the application is a kind of dashboard giving an overview of the System state. General information is displayed like the number of applications to process, the number of allocations to accept, the number of opened conflicts, etc.

Administration
This part of the application is exclusively reserved to the administrator. It allows him to define a series of parameters like:

The list of countries ; the list of registered organizations
The date of the process phases
The mails that should be automatically generated by the System
The color to use in the graphical representations (Google Map & Google Earth), etc.

It also allows him to exchange information on the applications and allocations with an external tool, thru import / export of an XLM file. The output of this tool is the basis of the new allocations generation.

Radar Information
The Radar information part gives an overview of all radar managed by the Mica cell and their official status. Different data exports are available from this part (PDF and Excel).

Applications Management
This is the first step of the code allocation process: the application for a new code. In this part, all the applications are listed with their status.
Through these screens, the user can also create new proposal (from scratch or based on existing ones). PDF exports are also available for the applications.

Allocations Management
It handles the allocation process, including the acceptation/refusal/objection coordination between the focal points and the administrator. The user also has to possibility to export an allocation in PDF, in KML (Google Earth) or view it on a map (Google Map).

Conflicts Management
This part of the application is focused on providing a way for users to solve conflicts online. This feature consists in a forum-like structure where users can discuss on different themes. This allows every logged user (except viewers) to participate to the conflict resolution. A mail mechanism allows to warn other users and administrators as soon as someone replies to a threat.