SASS-C

SASS-C

Developer(s)	Eurocontrol
Stable release	7.0 / January 7, 2011
Operating system	Linux
Type	Air Traffic Management Surveillance sensor performance assessment and trajectory reconstruction (tracker)
License	Eurocontrol Licence - Software available on request
Website	[1]

SASS-C is an acronym for "Surveillance Analysis Support System for ATC-Centre". It is an ATC-centre based Surveillance Analysis workbench for ATC Radar Plot Analysis and Tracker Performance Measurements. SASS-C is able to provide quality statistics analysis for:

• Primary radars
• Secondary radars
• Mode S
• ADS-B
• Multilateration

For inventory purposes, SASS-C is able to process:

• SMR
• A-SMGCS

Introduction

SASS-C (Surveillance Analysis Support System for ATC Centre) is a software toolbox developed by EUROCONTROL to provide standardised methods and tools for assessing the performance of Surveillance infrastructures.

Now widely distributed to civil and military Air Navigation Service Providers, R&D organisations and industrial partners in most of the states of the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC), SASS-C is typically used for:

• Monitoring the compliance of operational radar and trackers to nominal performance, and in particular those defined in the EUROCONTROL Surveillance Standard for En-Route and Major TMA.
• Supporting the periodical (daily/weekly/monthly) monitoring of the ATC Centre surveillance systems efficiency.
• Supporting air incident investigation.
• Supporting the development of radar and tracking systems.

The development of SASS-C is co-ordinated by EUROCONTROL under the guidance and assistance of the European National Administrations, outsourcing most of the life cycle activities to Industry and Research Institutes. This collaborative environment and the general independence from major ATC system suppliers brought required qualities for SASS-C to become rapidly a de facto standard within ECAC states for the analysis of classical Radars.

At present, SASS-C is designed to handle surveillance data from Radar sensors (PSR, SSR, Mode S elementary surveillance) in both a Mono- and Multiradar environment, and Trackers. In the future, extensions for handling ADS-B and multilateration data in addition to Radar data are foreseen.

System concept

The assessment of the input surveillance data is done by comparing it against a reference. The core concept of SASS-C is that such a reference is built from data provided by the surveillance infrastructure itself i.e. from the infrastructure to be analysed. The advantage of the method is that the evaluation can be done from opportunity traffic, which is a cheap way to perform evaluations (cheaper than e.g. running GPS test flights).

SASS-C v7

Since the beginning of development in 1988, the SASS-C software has been under constant evolution to cope with supplementary user requirements, to cover surveillance technology upgrades and to follow software technology changes.

In order to prepare SASS-C for the next decade, important software re-engineering has been undertaken in conjunction with functional upgrades, with the aim to introduce up to date technologies in all relevant fields while enhancing system quality. The main functional upgrades relate to the introduction of Aircraft Derived data (Mode S and ADS), and multilateration technology in the Surveillance environment.

The SASS-C software re-engineering is referred to as modularisation and was commenced at the end of 2003. The objective is to have a full evaluation of (?): It consists in migrating upgraded functionality into four different independent suites, interoperable through common interfaces called CSDF (Common Surveillance Data Format).

• IRIS (IOSS Recording and Import into SCDB) is the front element of SASS-C handling Surveillance Data from various sensors. The functionality comprises decoding, recording and computation of statistics.
• TRES (Trajectory Reconstruction and Evaluation Suite) is the core suite of SASS-C, carrying out the reconstruction of reference trajectories from the input data, and doing the evaluation of Surveillance constituent’s performance.
• SMART (Simulator for Multi-radar Analysis from Realistic Traffic) is an upgrade of the present real-time simulator generating Surveillance data reports by sampling simulated aircraft trajectories.
• SCAS (Surveillance Coverage Analysis Suite) comprises RASCAL and CAPT (Coverage And Planning Tool for ADS-B and TIS-B), a new tool to aid in the positioning of ADS-B and TIS-B ground stations by assessing various communication load scenarios.