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

COOPANS is well known as an efficient cooperation between the six Air Navigation Service providers for more than a decade, sharing a harmonised ATM platform with synchronized deployments and local adaptations. COOPANS are now ready to develop, harmonize and standardize even more.

EXODUS 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 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).

All in all, EXODUS will prove the concept of Air Navigation Service provision everywhere from anywhere in large scale across the six COOPANS members.

It shall furthermore, in this first step, prove the operational and business viability of a potential future common COOPANS operating model based on SESAR 2020 solutions PJ 16-03 and PJ 10-93A for “Business Continuity” as well as “federated test and training” purposes.

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.

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

The EXODUS project will co-operate with another Digital Sky Demonstrator project DEVICE, which is led by ENAIRE and focuses on solutions for Business continuity of Surveillance between Spain and Portugal.

You will be able to follow the project at COOPANS.com as well on SESAR 3 JU & CINEA websites.