COOPANS partners announced in November 2023 an agreement with the European Commission for the project EXODUS with 34,3 M€ in funding.  

The project is part of the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking and shall establish and demonstrate a Virtual Centre concept across all six COOPANS members.

COOPANS members are Austro Control, Croatia Control, AirNav Ireland, Luftfartsverket (Sweden), Naviair (Denmark) and NAV Portugal.

The common EXODUS Project Management Office is established in Naviair, Copenhagen Denmark.

EXODUS Project will run during 2024-2026 within the framework of the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking and its Digital European Sky research and innovation programme with partners Eurocontrol and Thales ATM, supplier of the COOPANS Topsky system.  The EXODUS project will in addition co-operate with another Digital Sky Demonstrator project DEVICE.

The project will be run as a Digital Sky Demonstrator (DSD) established as a Virtual Centre with various local implementation in each COOPANS member, ensuring both “State independence scenarios” and protection of “State sensitive data”.

The overall objective of the EXODUS project is to demonstrate the first step towards the vision of Virtualized Air traffic Control in the ATM Masterplan towards 2035. The EXODUS project aims to prove the viability of a federated COOPANS ATM system, established as a 3-layer model Virtual Centre, geographically separating the Aeronautical Data Service Providers (ADSP) from the location of the ATS Providers.

The EXODUS Virtual Centre Demonstrator provides an operating environment where COOPANS partners can demonstrate new Business Continuity concepts across the members in case of significant failures, by increasing technical and operational interoperability as envisioned in the ATM Masterplan. Furthermore, it will be a driver for faster uptake of new innovative solutions by working closer with industrial partners in a Digital Sky Demonstrator closer to the operational environment in middle stages of innovation projects.

EXODUS contributes to the SESAR Flagship “Virtualisation and cybersecure data-sharing” which is one of the nine Flagships identified in the SESAR Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA).

The Digital Sky Demonstrator shall display the following:

• Federated Business continuity for ATC provision with geographical separation of Air Traffic Management services and Aeronautical Data Processing services, in a Virtual Centre architecture. In principle to enable ANS provision everywhere from anywhere in the COOPANS community, enabling COOPANS one day to reduce physical installations and improving the philosophy of “develop and integrate once - deploy many".
• Federated Cyber Security for a common shared COOPANS platform across COOPANS members. Enabling trust across states, to secure state perspectives, as well as ATM secure solutions.
• Federated change management processes to reduce time to market for new innovative solutions with better quality. Enabling COOPANS to speed up the uptake of new technologies in a more standardized manner by exploiting such DSD environment as close to real life solutions as possible.
• Federated training of subject matter experts to increase harmonization and standardization. Enabling COOPANS to harmonize further and start sharing scarce expertise.

Contacts - EXODUS Program Management Office:

> Program Manager Niels Erik Pedersen > nep@naviair.dk

> COOPANS Coordinator Palle Gericke > pag@naviair.dk

Follow EXODUS Project 

> EXODUS on LinkedIn 

Archive EXODUS information 

SESAR JU, Project of the month November 2024. 

> A new step for COOPANS, a giant leap for virtual ATM services 

SESAR JU Project Portal 

> Digital sky demonstrator PROJECT, EXODUS 

This project has received funding from the EU under grant agreement No 101122636.