SASS-C

Infobox Software
name = SASS-C



caption = SASS-C running Plot Accuracy Analysis.
developer = Eurocontrol
latest_release_version = 6.5
latest_release_date = March 15, 2008
operating_system = Linux
genre = Air Traffic Management Surveillance sensor performance assessment and trajectory reconstruction (tracker)
license = Eurocontrol Licence
website = [http://www.eurocontrol.int/sass http://www.eurocontrol.int/sass]

Source: Eurocontrol Web site

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. If you are new with the tool, go to the overview page to find out more about it.

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 Architecture

SASS-C is organised into a number of complementary Modules:
* On top, the System Control Module controls data acquisition and execution of the evaluation sessions,
* At the heart, the Input Reconstruction Module creates the reference trajectories from recorded input data,
* Then, the Evaluation Module offers the user means to perform the required performance measurements.
* The Simulator can be used to generate realistic plot data by sampling realistic simulated aircraft trajectories.
* The Radar Coverage Module is used to draw MultiRadar coverage maps at various flight levels.