根据要求，代写软件需求说明书的第二部分。
Requirement
THIS SPEC MAY BE FURTHER DEVELOPED this week. Any changes will be highlighted
here…
You have been approached by a client who has an idea for a system that they
intend to offer to sell to Air Services Australia for use at Sydney Airport.
The problem as they see it
Currently a consortium including the Defence Science and Technology Group
(DSTG) is working on a new air traffic control system for Australian airspace
including both civil and defence operations. Such a system is a remarkably
difficult and safety critical system development job. It has a long timeline
and is behind schedule.
Meanwhile Sydney Airport is operating at maximum legislated capacity for most
of the day and minor difficulties caused by for example weather or aviation
emergencies can have significant knock-on implications and result in extensive
delays or even flight cancellations. Just weeks ago while students were
studying hard during the mid-semester break from lectures there was a school
holiday period and the air traffic control system at Sydney airport became
stuck in curfew operations mode severely limiting the number of flights that
could be processed during the important morning peak period. Some details
about that software difficulty are reported in the reported difficulty the
system was stuck in Operating Mode 1 which is described in publicly available
Air Services Australia documents as “not practical except during the required
Curfew period.” The Curfew period is between 11pm and 6am when very few
aircraft movements are permitted and the only other use of the airport is for
emergencies.
The media described the software problem in September as “a glitch”. But
Software Engineers and software engineering students know that what the public
calls “a glitch” implying a strange event that is not expected to reoccur is
in fact evidence of a software fault that could result unpredictably in
another software failure at any time.
The idea
Sydney airport operates under special legislative arrangements set out in the
Sydney Airport Long Term Operating Plan LTOP. This means that simply importing
standard air traffic control and planning systems will not work.
Sydney airport has 10 principal modes of operation numbered 1 to 14A – some
proposed modes have been given numbers but are not used. In some sense there
are 10 different air traffic control systems required.
The client specialises in distributed systems often using cloud based services
to provide scalable software solutions for a wide range of businesses
including logistics businesses business which have some needs that are similar
to aircraft movement planning an important part of air traffic control. They
propose to set up not in the cloud but on Air Services Australia property at
Sydney Airport at least ten virtual machines with their standard switching
technology. Each virtual machine can host a copy of the airport’s current air
traffic control software locked into one of the ten currently used modes and
the well-tested switching software can be used to connect controllers’
consoles and radar and transponder inputs to the system running the desired
mode at any particular point in time.
This means that the widely tested currently effective software can be used but
the known fault with unknown location in that very substantial software system
can be by-passed because no single instantiation of the software will ever
need to change mode.
The first priority is to get the system of virtual machines and their inputs
outputs and interconnections properly specified and tested. As an extension of
the work the client will consider also hosting the system in its own cloud-
based systems where high speed integration with the long term operations of
Brisbane Centre and Melbourne Centre the two bases for long distance air
traffic control in Australian Airspace could be arranged and Air Services
Australia’s IT costs substantially reduced. This second phase is more
speculative but the client believes that if it could demonstrate its
feasibility it would open up many new opportunities to use scalable cloud-
based systems in air traffic control and the advantages if demonstrated could
lead to the displacement of the currently under development DSTG system by
higher quality services provided by the client.
Your responsibility
The client has sent a representative to you to ask you to plan the software
requirements for the new system.
