Participatory Architectural Change MAnagement in ATM Systems (PACAS) is a Horizon 2020 project in the framework of the SESAR Research and Innovation Action (RIA).
Started in March 2016, PACAS will last 24 months.
The main objective is to better understand, model and analyse changes at different layers of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system to support change management, while capturing how architectural and design choices influence the overall system. The project aims at developing an innovative participatory change management process wherein heterogeneous stakeholders actively participate in the architectural evolution of the ATM system.
The novelty and expected impact of PACAS relies on three main pillars: 1. Impact propagation techniques, 2. Gamified platform, 3. Domain-specific modelling languages. These are key components of the participatory design process wherein multiple, heterogeneous ATM domain stakeholders participate, each having a different view of the system, bi-directional relationships are in place between the strategic layers and the architecture layer, and the PACAS platform is crucial to establish and maintain consistency among the different layers and views.
Air Traffic Management primarily consists of three distinct activities: Air Traffic Control, Air Traffic Flow Management, Aeronautical Information Services.
See: EUROCONTROL.
It is the topic of discussion of the participatory change management process. A change issue is solved when change management process is finished for that particular topic.
A set of activities performed to change a system.
In each view only relevant concerns (related to the relative area of expertise) are considered and highlighted when architectural changes are introduced, and expressed with an adequate language of the domain.
See: Karsai et al. 2009
The use of game elements in non-gaming contexts in order to maximize the long-term engagement to the decision process. It employs game elements that provide adequate, valuable incentives and rewards when stakeholders help each other.
A hierarchy of goals, which represent desired state of affairs, suitable to model strategic concerns of the stakeholders they help refining high-level concerns into lower level more concrete pieces, in building the ‘why’ relationships between the higher and lower levels.
A model including several layers of abstraction of an ATM system e.g. architectural, strategic layer and different ATM sub-domains e.g. organisational (structure), security, and safety to tackle the complexity of the ATM system.
The output of the PACAS project, which consists in the change management process customized for ATM systems and the PACAS platform.
A gamified web-based software that supports the change management process in ATM systems.
High-level management bodies, regulators, policy makers and analysts of Navigation Service Providers and aviation and aeronautics industries, including safety, security and IT managers and air traffic controllers.
A co-management activity made by the end-to-end interaction and consultation between stakeholders, providing background, experience and know-how from her own sub-domain perspective, to ensure better and sustainable change management process.
Reasoning techniques: ad-hoc, strategic guided reasoning process helping to model the relations between layers and propagation of changes.
PACAS is expected to deliver the following outcomes:
To develop a gamified participatory design process to support change management for the (re)design of European ATM Systems. The process will provide participants a semi-structured way of modelling, and a set of guidelines for open decision-making to include all participants in the modelling process. The process will be gamified to increase engagement of the participants. A proof-of-concept platform will be developed to assist the developed design process and include gamification elements.
To represent essential concepts for modelling ATM systems, to capture strategic objectives of the involved ATM domain stakeholders (safety, security, economic and organisational concerns) in dedicated views, emphasizing the Socio-Technical nature of ATM systems. Interdependencies between different levels of abstraction will be captured. The representation of possible changes and their impacts on other parts of ATM systems is also a main objective of the modelling language that will be created.
To develop reasoning techniques to support the analysis of strategic objectives (from multiple perspectives/views) and the interdependencies between the strategic and functional (operational, service, system) levels to preserve alignment between the two. This will require formalizing the links between the various views and the architectural components to determine the impact of changes from one to the other. Moreover, the consistency of the single views will be checked and the alignment of multiple views will be ensured through formal verification techniques.
To demonstrate and evaluate the practical use of the participatory design process and of the modelling and reasoning techniques. Reference scenarios will be created to validate the modelling languages developed, as well as qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques. The usability and the effectiveness of the modelling language will be validated by an external Advisory Board, composed of ATM domain stakeholders. Reasoning techniques, multi-objective optimization functions and automatically found optimal solutions are validated by the Advisory Board.
PACAS consists of six different work packages. Two of the work packages, namely WP1 “Project Management” and WP6 “Dissemination, Communication and Exploitation”, impact the project horizontally, which means that they contribute to the project outcomes during the entire project period. These are leaded by UNITN and DBL, respectively. Four work packages, namely WP2, WP3, WP4 and WP5 will be dedicated to technical tasks that must be carried out to deliver the PACAS platform:
A Gamified Platform for Participatory Change Management in ATM Systems. Presented at the REFSQ2018 conference in Utrecht.
Agon: An Acceptance Requirements Framework for Designing Gamification Solutions. To be brought to the ICT Days 2018 of the University of Trento.
Towards Aligning Models via NLP. Brought to the Research Day of the Computer Science Department of Utrecht University.
A Requirements Engineering Framework for Analyzing and Designing Acceptance through Gamification. Brought to the ICT Days 2017 of the University of Trento.
PACAS Change Management Process. Brought to the International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP) 2017.
Participatory Architectural Change MAnagement in ATM Systems (PACAS): preliminary validation results. Prepared for the SESAR Innovation Days (SIDs) 2016.
IT — Il controllo del traffico aereo (webmagazine.unitn.it) — 28 August 2016
IT — UniTrento coordinerà il progetto PACAS per la gestione partecipativa del traffico aereo (ilVolo.it) — 18 March 2016
IT — Aeroporti più sicuri, ci pensa l’Ateneo trentino (l’Adige) — 17 March 2016
IT — Trasporti, progetto Ue Pacas per gestire al meglio traffico aereo (Askanews.it) — 16 March 2016
IT — Gestione del traffico aereo: una questione di partecipazione (l’Adigetto.it) — 16 March 2016
NO — Dataspill: Redningen for europeisk luftfart? (Flynytt) — 27 September 2016
NO — Dataspill som verktøy for it-endringer (Computerworld – cw.no) — 13 September 2016
NO — Dataspill – en nøkkel til å håndtere IT-endringer? (Abcnyheter.no) — 4 September 2016
NO — Kan dataspill hjelpe oss med å samarbeide? (Forskning.no) — 2 September 2016
NO — Kapasiteten i luftrommet er sprengt – nå skal ekspertene “spille” seg fram til en løsning (Teknisk Ukeblad – TU.no) — 2 September 2016
NO — Dataspill skal hjelpe europeisk luftfart (gemini.no) — 2 September 2016
![]() |
Contact: Paolo Giorgini |
The Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of Trento University covers the main topics of information technology and engineering, and raises a number of research and industrial projects. The research node TrentoRISE is the national reference point for start-ups in the ICT field. |
![]() |
Contact: Martina Ragosta |
A research and consultancy SME specialised in user-centred design, human factor, safety, validation and scientific dissemination. Deep Blue operates in contexts with high security, dependability and resilience requirements, such as Air Traffic Management, Aviation, Railways and Healthcare. |
![]() |
Contact: Matthieu Branlat |
Scandinavia’s largest independent research organisation, SINTEF has international top-level expertise in a wide range of technological and scientific disciplines. SINTEF contributed to aviation projects for ANSPs, accident investigation board, airlines and Norwegian regulation authorities. |
![]() |
Contact: Fabiano Dalpiaz |
The Department of Information and Computing Sciences of Utrecht University, organised in four divisions (Virtual Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, Interaction Technology and Software Systems), is a leading centre of academic research into serious games, virtual worlds, and multi-agent systems in Europe. |
The PACAS consortium is formed by highly qualified partners that have complimentary expertise and experience to fulfil the project aim. It is composed by Università degli studi di Trento (UNITN), Deep Blue Srl (DBL), Stiftelsen Sintef (SINTEF) and Universiteit Utrecht (UUTR).
As such the PACAS project will open new venues of research towards ATM system architectural modelling and design, by exploiting the highly interdisciplinary skills of the consortium team working in System Engineering, Gaming Techniques, Software Engineering Process, user-centred design and validation, that will provide novel approaches to enhance ATM architecture and complementing SESAR current solutions. Moreover, over the years, the partners of the consortium have already established a solid network among different stakeholders which will play a key role in this project.
This project has received funding from the SESAR Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 699306 under European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation. © – 2016 – University of Trento, Deep Blue, SINTEF, University of Utrecht. All rights reserved. Licensed to the SESAR Joint Undertaking under conditions.