The “Total Information Sharing for Pilot Situational Awareness Enhanced by Intelligent Systems” (TALIS) project was a European Community 5th Framework project developed by the TALIS consortium that made an innovative approach to contribute to the improvements of efficiency and safety of the overall air traffic system. TALIS proposed technological solutions to further strengthen the pilots’ decision role, in supplying him/her with ambient intelligence through total information sharing, to the benefit of the European air traveler.
TALIS proposed a study to investigate the viability and benefits of adopting an approach based on standardized architectures to provide for pilot situational awareness, resulting in a safer and more efficient air-traffic management process involving interactions between the ground and the air. This study brought benefits to the public traveling and enhanced the competitiveness of European industry.
The TALIS project addressed the following topics:
- Federated architecture, which resulted in a generic and open architecture, on which the TALIS applications were built;
- Intelligent pilot assistance applications consisted in:
- Traffic Information Services, enabled the pilot, through browsing capabilities, to have access to surrounding information (aircraft, vehicles on ground, airport, airspace);
- Critical Weather, information update, provided the pilot with weather information relevant for the outgoing flight, on a real-time basis.
- Avionics certification related with the implementation of commercial-off-the-shelf software in the cockpit (middleware, java components, etc.).
Further objectives were to:
- Specify applications within a standardized ground-based and commercially available architectures to provide for efficient operations within the cockpit as part of the concept for gate-to-gate operations;
- Undertake activities to validate the proposed approach;
- Investigate the issues associated with certification of the proposed architectures;
- Report on the validated approach with identification of the role of standards within the overall architecture.
TALIS put a high focus on pilot assistance systems for vision and alertness enhancement, safety and maneuvering, compliance with regulations, providing and reacting to emergency, traffic and weather information. The different services proposed by TALIS all assisted the pilot in his/her navigation task and assisted him/her in maneuvering the aircraft, gave new alerts, created a better integration with Air Traffic Control (ATC) and Airline Operational Control (AOC), and supplied amongst others traffic and weather information.
TALIS put main focus on architectural issues, i.e. to ensure dependable and optimal use of components and the development of industrial consensus on common specifications and in vehicle platforms, e.g. through special work packages on architectural pre-standards for the entire system including the aircraft and aircraft infrastructure, and through dedicated work packages on airborne certification.