AIMS: an SQL-based system for airspace monitoring

In this paper, we present the "Airspace Monitoring System" (AIMS) for monitoring and analyzing flight data streams with respect to the occurrence of arbitrary complex events. In contrast to already existing tools which often focus on a single task like flight delay detection, we want to provide a more general system that allows for a comprehensive analysis of aircraft movements. This includes, e.g., the detection of critical deviations from the current flight plan, abnormal approach parameters of landing flights as well as areas with an increased risk of collisions. To this end, tracks are extracted from cluttered radar data and SQL views are employed for a timely processing of these tracks. Our general aim is to show that conventional relational database technology is capable of dealing with data streams of remarkably high complexity and frequency.