Developer(s) Eurocontrol Operating system | Stable release 7.0 / January 7, 2011 Website [1] | |
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Type Air Traffic Management Surveillance sensor performance assessment and trajectory reconstruction (tracker) License Eurocontrol Licence - Software available on request | ||
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:
Contents
For inventory purposes, SASS-C is able to process:
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:
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).