AVENUE: a platform for testing new concepts, the building block of a european ATM system

Faced with the urgent need to facilitate the next generation of Air Traffic Management systems and to alleviate the insufficient interoperability of its components, standardisation and validation activities have to be promoted. The AVENUE project brings to the public domain a set of interfaces and an ATC data dictionary defined by consensus of all stake-holders. The project goes on to prove the correctness of an architecture for open validation platforms with a first instance based at the Eurocontrol Experimental Centre which was built with existing ATC components provided by key European ATC players. This will constitute a solid basis for validation activities in the European Commission 5th Framework Programme and in other R&D programmes.