ATRACC (Air Traffic Riga Area Control Centre) comprises an ATM system for tower, approach and area control of the Riga FIR. The system has been designed, produced and implemented by Swedish company Systemintegrering AB.
The ATM product features some truly pioneering aspects. The product is based on high level requirements, resulting from studies of advanced air traffic control concepts, including multi–radar tracking, advanced flight plan data integration, predicted flight trajectories, OLDI (On-Line Data Interchange), silent co-ordination and paperless HMI. Especially as regards the latter, ATRACC is one of the first projects to have implemented these functions in full for area, approach and tower control.
From the functional point of view, the system consists of two main components: a Primary System, providing the full functionality described above, and a Radar Bypass System for use if the primary system should fail.
The system that is built on standard commercial off-the–shelf (COTS) products, has an open architecture and can easily be expanded. It comprises 15 working positions intended for operators with different operational roles, specifically TWR (tower), ACC (Area Control), APP (Approach Control), ARCC (Area Rescue Co-ordination Centre), FDA (Flight Data Assistant), HIST (History, Recording and Playback), OSUP (Operational Supervisor) and TSUP (Technical Supervisor).
The ATRACC contract was signed in January 1996 and the major part of the system was in operational use as early as December 1998.
The system was certified for air traffic control by Civil Aviation Administration of Latvia on the 2nd of November 1999.
ATRACC modernization
ATRACC system at Riga ATCC is updated by ATM added functions according to EUROCONTROL recommendations, and has got a set of ATC tools:
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Conformance monitoring - monitoring of flights to detect potential and actual deviations or non-conformances with the planned and predicted flight trajectory.
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Reminder handling - serves to remind controllers of planned flight-related actions.
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Medium-term conflict detection (MTCD) - a set of functions that assist controllers in a continuous monitoring of the air situation by detecting potential conflicts and airspace penetrations and provides tentative flight trajectories (PROBE function) assisting, if necessary, to resolve the situation by taking corrective action.
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Safety nets (SNET) consisting of three tools:
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Short Term Conflict Alert (STCA)
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Minimum Safe Altitude Warning (MSAW)
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Area Proximity Warning (APW).
