Clients

Overview

The FAA regulates and operates public aviation in the United States, and is responsible for maintaining the safety of such flights. As part of an Agency wide effort to promote safety across the National Airspace, detailed data is collected surrounding all types of incidents involving aircraft. Information influencing incidents such as Near Mid-Air Collisions and airport runway violations can provide insight into safety trends that may be used to avoid such dangerous events in the future.

Objectives

As part of an Agency wide effort to move to a Performance Based Organization (PBO), the FAA has begun to collect detailed data for multiple dimensions of the agency's operations. Items such as traffic counts, flight operations, facility time and attendance/financial information, and safety data had historically been distributed across multiple locations and contained in many different media making it extremely difficult to turn this data into useful information. VMD led a cross functional team comprised of DBA's, Report Designers, Data Analysts, and Software Developers in the design and development of an agency wide data warehouse and reporting system. Currently, the data warehouse has approximately 150 million records and is growing by approximately 12 million additional records per month.

Requirements

Full life-cycle internet J2EE software development effort for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)

• Online, web-enabled application
• Streamlined data collection via user interface
• Consolidated reporting and archiving
• Standardization of form formatting
• Personalized content and preferences
• Flexible user management and security modules

Solution Description

• Hardware: Clustered Sun Fire V480s running Sun Solaris 8
• Languages, Databases, and other Development Support Tools: Oracle 9i Database, Oracle 9iAS, J2EE, OID/LDAP, XML, Hibernate, Struts, ANT, Eclipse IDE, ClearCase, ClearQuest, RationalRose, UML

Deployed through a mix of an Actuate supplied portal (ActivePortal) and a custom web portal, the system relies heavily on Oracle software products (Oracle 9i Database, Oracle 9iAS, and Oracle Internet Directory/LDAP for authentication and roles based access) as well as open source frameworks (Hibernate for the persistence layer and Struts/JSPs for the presentation tier). The solution utilizes a combination of standard and parameterized reports whose aggregated data has been cached to allow for fast response times and large user volumes. Additionally, power users have the ability to analyze aggregated as well as transactional data through Actuate Query - a wizard driven tool that assist non-developers in constructing large queries while hiding the complexity of the generated SQL statements.

The system provides for personalized roles based access with integration into an Oracle OID based identity directory underway. From the beginning, report server management was thought of as a critical project activity due to the magnitude of the source data and the anticipated user request volume. Once completed, integration into the agency's LDAP will allow for the differentiation of approximately 2000 separate LDAP security groups for 50,000+ users throughout the FAA and other federal agencies.

Process

VMD followed the Rational Unified Process through all phases of the ATQA development effort. The project team completed such activities as Vision formulation, business modeling, requirements analysis and definition through use cases, architectural design, team development, requirements based testing, and configuration managed transition to a national production rollout. The ATQA software delivery model formed the basis for the FAA's effort to become an iCMM certified software development organization.

Results

VMD led the successful delivery of a multi-tier, agency wide J2EE web application for the collection of aviation safety incidents. The application has undergone 4 subsequent version releases and has added 9,000 FAA employees as registered users. 100% of all FAA tracked incidents are now being collected and managed through the ATQA system. In addition, the ATQA application has served as the foundation for additional FAA enterprise web development efforts that VMD is continuing to support.