EUROCONTROL
EUROCONTROL is an intergovernmental organisation with 42 Member and 2 Comprehensive Agreement States.
Aeronautical Feature On Demand 2.0.0
Abstract
AFOD 2.0.0 is a CP1 compliant SWIM service. AFOD 2.0.0 provides essential information with regards to enabling the exchange of data with ADM (AIXM 5.1.1) through a system-to-system connection, using the AIMSL interfaces. AIMSL (Aeronautical Information Management Service Layer) provides a REST Web Services based standard interface to the same ADM functions. The users are able to extract data using the following general scenario: 1. User sends a REST request to AIMSL, 2. AIMSL forwards the request to ADM, 3. ADM performs the requested actions, 4. ADM sends a REST response to AIMSL, 5. AIMSL forwards the response to the User. The AFOD 2.0.0 Service offers two means of requesting/extracting data: - a feature request method based on OGC Web Feature Service 2.0 with the temporal extension (WFS-TE) - a dataset extraction method based on Publish/Subscribe MEP (using REST and AMQP 1.0 protocol).
Service Type
SWIM_COMPLIANT
Abbreviation
EUROCONTROL
Life Cycle
Business Activity Type
INFORMATION_MANAGEMENT
Intended Consumer
Information Exchange Category
AERONAUTICAL_INFORMATION_EXCHANGE
Application Message Exchange Pattern Entity
ICAO Region
Worldwide
Geospatial Categorisation Description
Worldwide
In-Operation Date
15-May-2025
Provider
Provider Type
AERONAUTICAL_INFORMATION_SERVICE_PROVIDER
Point of Contact
General
Operational Needs
AFOD 2.0.0 provides access to the aeronautical data.
AFOD 2.0.0 uses OGC Web Feature Service queries and an additional subscription service to provide on-demand aeronautical information encoded in AIXM 5.1.1 format.
Query and aggregate data from different sources, in order to produce e.g. flight manuals, FMS (Flight Management System)
Use aeronautical data and information in preparation and execution of GAT/OAT flight operations.
Provide and use aeronautical information/data supporting airport operations in order to facilitate the oversight of the airside operations, landside operations as well as information management related to the collection and distribution of daily flight information.
Provide and consume aeronautical information in order to discharge the obligations of the ICAO Member States in line with the Chicago Convention and its Annexes, such as Annex 15 (Aeronautical Information Services), Annex 4 (Aeronautical Charts), facilitate cross-border data coordination, supporting LoAs, SLAs, etc.
Use aeronautical information and data in FDP (Flight Data Processing) systems and ARO (Air Traffic Services Reporting Office) services.
Use aeronautical information and data supporting the provision of air traffic and flow management, CNS (Communication Navigation Surveillance) services, aeronautical information and meteorologic services, SAR (Search and Rescue) services.
Use aeronautical information and data for the management and provision of the European ATM Network services including ATFM, ATFCM, IFPS, etc.
Capabilities
The methods implemented by the service offer a large palette of aeronautical information data, required by customers who consume and provide harmonized and up-to-date data.
Functionality
AFOD 2.0.0 provides a query interface by means of the standardized OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) returning existing data according to the applied filters. When temporal filters are used, AFOD 2.0.0 provides a temporal query interface (based on a Temporal Extension (WFS-TE)) returning the requested data in accordance with the AIXM 5.1.1 temporality.
AFOD 2.0.0 offers a web service providing AIXM 5.1.1 files for consumption.
Access and Use
In order to be able to access and use AFOD 2.0.0, Consumers need to become clients and sign the Client Agreement.
More in detail:
1. the data consumer has to register as an Data User or Commercial User Client,
2. the Organisation of the Data Consumer requires an AIMSL (B2B) license,
3. the Data Consumer user requires an EACP (European Aviation Common PKI) user certificate for authentication/authorisation purposes,
4. the Data Consumer user has to use, as a minimum, sdd-wfs and/or SDDDownloadWebService.
The AFOD 2.0.0 consumers may use data in order to integrate it in data products or facilitate their operations. Reselling data is prohibited.
Customers can be negatively impacted when data usage is disproportionate and for extended periods. As protection mechanism, AFOD 2.0.0 service will restrict excessive requests originated from the same client.
The authentication is based on WS-Security and requires all users to sign the requests using an X.509 certificate.
In order to consume the AFOD 2.0.0 services, the Data Consumer user must have the appropriate user roles corresponding to the licenses allocated to their organisation.
Quality of Service
Response Time is designed in function of the operation complexity.
- Low Complexity filter criteria in an AIS Data Query, the average response time is less or equal to 6 seconds
- Medium Complexity filter criteria in an AIS Data Query, the average response time is less or equal to 9 seconds
- High Complexity filter criteria in an AIS Data Query, the average response time is less or equal to 22.5 seconds
- Very High Complexity filter criteria in an AIS Data Query, the average response time is less or equal to 75 seconds
- Low complexity query parameters:
-- (Dynamic) Feature Filter
--- Validity - validTime
--- Identifier
--- ADMExtension.DataSource
--- Interpretation
--- NaturalDescriptorExtension
-- Time slice Projection
--- relevantTime
--- Interpretation
- Medium complexity query parameters:
-- Any combination of Low complexity filter conditions and
-- (Dynamic) Feature Filter
--- By Feature time slice Simple Properties
-- Time slice Projection
--- By Feature time slice Simple Properties
- High complexity query parameters:
-- Any combination of filter conditions with:
--- Low complexity
--- Medium complexity and
-- (Dynamic)Feature Filter
--- By Feature time slice complex properties
--- One Spatial Filter Condition
-- Time slice Projection
--- By Feature time slice complex properties
- Very high complexity query parameters:
-- Any combination of filter conditions with:
--- Low complexity
--- Medium complexity
--- High complexity and
-- (Dynamic)Feature Filter
--- multiple Spatial Filter Condition
Data Set extractions with:
- Low complexity Data Set Extraction Rules â minimum throughput of 100 MB per 1 minute
- Medium complexity Data Set Extraction Rules â minimum throughput of 100MB per 5 minutes
- High complexity Data Set Extraction Rules â minimum throughput of 100MB per 10 minutes
- Very High complexity Data Set Extraction Rules â minimum throughput of 100MB per 30 minutes.
- Low complexity data set extraction rules:
-- Feature Interpretation
-- Feature Validity
-- Feature Types
-- Data Provider
- Medium complexity data set extraction rules:
-- Low complexity filters
-- Feature Time slice simple properties
- High complexity data set extraction rules:
-- Filter conditions with any of the following:
--- Low complexity filters
--- Medium complexity filters
-- Filter conditions on the Feature Time slice complex properties
-- One Spatial condition
- Very high complexity data set extraction rules:
-- Filter conditions with any of the following:
--- Low complexity
--- Medium complexity
--- High complexity
-- Multiple Spatial conditions
The throughput of the service has a capacity of 22000 requests per work day.
The throughput of the service has a capacity of 2000 requests per work day.
The availability of AFOD 2.0.0 Service is at least 99,975%.
The unplanned unavailability of AFOD 2.0.0 services shall not exceed 30 minutes (RTO = 30 minutes). In case of incidents AFOD 2.0.0 service ensures that no data is lost (RPO = 15) followed by operational procedures to recover potential data losses.
When speaking about data confidentiality, data is encrypted at the application level, above the transport layer. AFOD 2.0.0 service is accessed via HTTPS over a connection which encrypts messages and payloads using mTLS protocol.
The AFOD 2.0.0 service payloads are wrapped with MD5 checksum algorithm providing the possibility to verify that data didn't suffer unintended corruption. Further, data integrity is ensured by the mTLS (which is based on TLS v1.2).
Validation
Service Support
Abbreviations
Airspace Data Repository
Aeronautical features on demand
Aeronautical Information Management
AIM Service Layer
Aeronautical Information Publication
Aeronautical Information Regulation and Control
ATM Information Reference Model
Aeronautical Information Services
Aeronautical Information Exchange Model
Airspace Management Cell
Air Traffic Services Reporting Office
Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management
Air Traffic Flow Management
Air Traffic Management
Conditional Route
Committed Information Rate
Communication, Navigation & Surveillance
AMC - manageable Danger Area
Data Operations Provider
Enhanced European AIS Database
Airspace Data Repository
European Union Aviation Safety Agency
European Civil Aviation Conference
Factory Acceptance Testing
Flow and Capacity Management
Flight Data Processing
Flight Management System
Free Route Airspace
Flexible Use of Airspace
General Air Traffic
Geography Markup Language
Globally Unique Identifier
Hypertext Transport Protocol
Secure HTTP
International Civil Aviation Organization
Interface Control Document
Integrated Initial Flight Plan Processing System
Information Technology Provider
Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism
Operational Air Traffic
Open Geospatial Consortium
AMC manageable Restricted Area
Recovery Point Objective
Recovery Time Objective
Search and Rescue
Site Acceptance Testing
Static and Dynamic Data
Service Layer Agreement
Service Level Specification
Simple Object Access Protocol
System Quality Testing
System-Wide Information Management
Transport Layer Security
Uniform Resource Locator
Universally Unique Identifier
Virtual Private Network
Web Feature Service
Web Service Description Language
Extensible Markup Language
Information
Information Definition
AIXM
https://aixm.aero
The Aerospace Data Repository (ADR) implements the Flexible Use of Airspace (FUA) data model extension which supports: AMC - manageable areas (D_AMC, R_AMC), conditional routes (CDR) and Free Route Airspace (FRA). The supported feature extensions can be found using the following link: https://aixm.aero/schema/5.1/extensions/EUR/EAD/ADR/EADADR_Features.xsd
https://aixm.aero/schema/5.1/extensions/EUR/EAD/ADR/EADADR_DataTypes.xsd
Filtering
AFOD 2.0.0 supports the retrieval of AIXM 5.1.1 features located fully or partially in a referenced airspace identified by its gml:identifier (UUID). The following spatial operators are supported: Beyond, Contains, Crosses, Disjoint, DWithin, Equals, Intersects, Overlaps, Touches and Within.
Temporal filters based on WFS-TE supporting the following temporality use cases: 3,4,6,7,8.
AFOD 2.0.0 implements the following comparison operators: PropertyIsEqualTo, PropertyIsNotEqualTo, PropertyIsLessThan, PropertyIsGreaterThan, PropertyIsLessThanOrEqualTo, PropertyIsGreaterThanOrEqualTo, PropertyIsLike.
Logical operators are also supported but does not implement additional functions.
Source of Information
1. AIS Providers migrated as static Data Providers.
2. Data Operations Provider (DOP), for the world-wide minimum static dataset.
2. Data Operations Provider (DOP), for the world-wide minimum static dataset.
Technical
Technical Constraint
In case the message "HTTP ERROR 500 - Internal server error" occurs, it is possible that the query is producing an MTOM file exceeding the size limit of 750 MB. In such case it is recommended to refine the query.
Not implemented.
Not implemented.
Not implemented.
Not implemented.
As recommended in OGC WFS Profile best practices document, the CountDefault parameter is restricted to a value of 200. Consequently, all WFS requests that do not specify a value for the "count" parameter will return at most 200 results.
WFS and WFS-TE queries referring to an Airspace support the specification of a buffer area around the Airspace.
Features located fully or partially inside the buffer area are retrieved even if they are not inside the Airspace.
The buffer area can be specified in any unit of measure.
With reference to OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) (OGC 09-025r2) AFOD 2.0.0 supports all temporal filters.
With reference to OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) Temporality Extension (OGC 12-027r3) AFOD 2.0.0 does not implement the following use cases: Use case 1 and Use case 2.
The AFOD 2.0.0 services are exposed via a technical infrastructure (AIMSL).
To avoid negative impact, when data usage is disproportionate and for extended periods, AIMSL is responsible for monitoring and limiting large amounts of requests in short periods of time (to be updated).
Service Monitoring
Not available to consumer.
Behaviour
The behaviour under normal conditions:
- for sdd-wfs service, the Data Consumer sends the WFS or WFS-TE request and expects the corresponding response; the details of accepted requests are covered by ADM XML Primer section 2.3.6.2.
- for SDDDownloadWebService, the Data Consumer creates extraction rule and subscription in order to define WHAT DATA should be downloaded and WHEN the dataset generation execution should be performed.
You can find guidance on how to build parameter sets in the Operational User Handbook - Data User.
For download jobs, using AIMSL file distribution, the user will be provided with functionality that:
* Enables an AIMSL publish/subscribe topic for every subscribed user
* Notifies subscribed users about any download job status changes and errors via the created AIMSL topic
* Creates download and log files
* Provides a REST endpoint, registered as AIMSL Proxy, which accepts a download identifier and returns the log and download file matching the given identifier.
* Cleans up the created files and topics after the download.
The details of accepted requests are covered by ADM XML Primer section 2.3.6.2.
All responses provide feedback of type information, warning or error depending on the execution success.
The complete list of the response feedback is available in the ADM XML Primer document, appendix A.2 Error, info and warning messages supported by SDD.
Interfaces
The Query Service for AIXM 5.1.1 is based on the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service Interface Standard (WFS).
Operations
The GetCapabilities operation generates a service metadata document describing a WFS service provided by a server.
Idempotent
IDEMPOTENT
Operation Message
Binding Method
SWIM_TI_YP_1_0_WS_LIGHT
The DescribeFeatureType operation returns a schema description of feature types offered by a WFS instance.
Idempotent
IDEMPOTENT
Operation Message
Binding Method
SWIM_TI_YP_1_0_WS_LIGHT
The GetPropertyValue operation allows the value of a feature property or part of the value of a complex feature property to be retrieved from the data store for a set of features identified using a query expression.
Idempotent
NON_IDEMPOTENT
Operation Message
Binding Method
SWIM_TI_YP_1_0_WS_LIGHT
The GetFeature operation returns a selection of features from a data store. Ref WSDL & OGC
Idempotent
NON_IDEMPOTENT
Operation Message
Binding Method
SWIM_TI_YP_1_0_WS_LIGHT
The ListStoredQueries operation lists the stored queries available at a server.
Idempotent
IDEMPOTENT
Binding Method
SWIM_TI_YP_1_0_WS_LIGHT
The DescribeStoredQueries operation provides detailed metadata about each stored query expression that a server offers.
Idempotent
IDEMPOTENT
Operation Message
Binding Method
SWIM_TI_YP_1_0_WS_LIGHT
Endpoints
The REST service points to a URL /swim/wfs/5.1.1 (AIXM5.1.1) which is routed by AIMSL to the WFS implementation.
Url
url:/swim/wfs/5.1.1
Reference
Service Interface Binding
A WFS-2.0 is bound for the REST architectural style.
Network Interface Binding
SWIM TI Yellow Profile specification
Messages
This request fetches exported AIXM 5.1.1 files, based on the defined parameter set.
Operations
Retrieves a specific download AIXM 5.1.1 XML file using a notifications process.
The steps of the above-mentioned process are as follows:
1. User creates a new Extraction rule and Subscription.
2. System automatically creates a "topic" within AIMSL per user who is specified as "Subscriber" for the download.
3. The specified user may subscribe to the appropriate topic and recurrently consume messages published to his queue. To subscribe, user shall use an existing AMQP queue, which was created prior the subscription request.
4. The appropriate topic expression should be set as "adm:<user_id>".
5. Once the system starts dataset generation job, every status change of the active generation process is notified to the topic. Possible values are QUEUED, PROCESSING, FINISHED, FAILED and CANCELLED.
6. When the status changes to FINISHED, the id of the created file is provided with the notification as the <downloadFileId>.
It is needed to request the download result via WS operation downloadAixmMessageFile - see ADM XML Primer, section 2.3.2.4 "Download Operations".
Idempotent
IDEMPOTENT
Operation Message
Binding Method
SWIM_TI_YP_1_1_WS_LIGHT
Parameter
Endpoints
For security reasons, the addresses will be communicated only to customers.
Resource Type
URL
Url
url:withheld
Reference
Service Interface Binding
The web service is bound to the REST architectural style.
Network Interface Binding
SWIM TI Yellow Profile specification
Messages
References
Service Documents
urn:aero:airm:1.2.0:ContextualModel:ATMBusinessTerms:Aeronautical_information
Reference
The semantic correspondence with AIXM 5.1.1 can be found here:
https://airm.aero/developers/advanced-search/1.2.0/Aeronautical%2520information?model=ContextualModel
Implemented Standards
The GML Profile for aeronautical data is limited to 2D elements and includes only the features necessary for encoding geometries of type point, line/curve and polygon/surface (outer boundaries only).
The following components of GML are out of scope for the AIXM GML Profile: Topology, Linear Referencing, Coverages.
This additional GML component necessary to the ISO 19139 (gco /basicTypes.xsd), which is imported in the GML and AIXM metadata, needs additional types. These types are not included in this profile.
This International Standard specifies the behaviour of a service that provides transactions on and access to geographic features in a manner independent of the underlying data store. It specifies discovery operations, query operations, locking operations, transaction operations and operations to manage stored parameterized query expressions.
REST (Representational State Transfer) is a set of constraints for designing and developing web-based systems that are scalable, reliable, and loosely coupled. REST APIs use HTTP methods (such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to define actions that can be performed on resources. These methods align with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations, which are used to manipulate resources over the web.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.
The temporality extension has been developed in order to align the OGC WFS 2.0 and FES 2.0 standards with the AIXM 5.1.1 Temporality Concept. It allows retrieving data in AIXM 5.1.1 format via OGC WFS 2.0 requests.
We have added a subscription mechanism WS-N.
Revision Save Date
Mon, 05/26/2025 - 13:48
Schema version
v2