One of the essential activities in civil aviation is the one deployed by the Aeronautical Information Services (AIS). The object of this service is to ensure the necessary information flow for the safety, regularity and efficiency of the international aerial navigation. In Spain the Aeronautical Information Division of AENA is in charge of providing this service to users; this Division in particular publishes and updates specific aeronautical cartography for flight operations. The aeronautical charts provide an adequate method of providing this information in a manageable, condensed, coordinated manner. Consequently most aeronautical segments consider them a basic reference for planning, aerial transit control and navigation.

At the present time the technological evolution of aircrafts allows creating the appropriate environments for the presentation of aeronautical charts at the pilot cockpit through electronic devices. The development of solutions on the basis of this new technological context may even reach beyond the printed charts, undoubtedly providing great advantages. However, in order to reach efficient results in the context of the electronic presentation of aeronautical charts, it is necessary to assess new methodologies of geographic information visualisation far from the direct translation of the printed to the electronic format.

The proposed project centres its efforts in the pursuit of solutions of cartographic visualisation fed by the data generated by the AIS of AENA; these solutions should communicate the information of situations and attributes within the aeronautical scope in a functional, attractive and effective manner.

Objectives

The objective of the project is to discover a coordinated set of cartographic visualisation solutions which, when translated to the electronic presentation of aeronautical charts (preferably on flight), remarkably achieves enhancement of its value and effectiveness in terms of message communicability

Thus we aspire to translate the set of proposed solutions to different purposely created visualisation applications which should benefit of the advantages anticipated in the proposed theoretical visualisation models.

The specific objectives of the research are as follows:

•  Study the scope of aerial navigation in general and the aeronautical cartography in particular.

•  Carry out a semiologic/cartographic analysis of the problem within the Situational Awareness (SA)".

•  Identify the technological bases needed for the development of dynamic cartography systems.

•  Realize (in a second phase of the project) a small application of visualisation of interactive aeronautical charts over a preferably mobile device.

Key Results