Ocean Software’s TAMS (Task and Area Management System) solution is a web-based, visual planning tool that makes the forward planning and booking of airspace and support services easy.
Across Airforce bases, it is still common practice to use whiteboards, Excel, phone calls and emails to coordinate and forward plan airspace, people and resources.
Planning meetings can take several hours, and this effort exponentially increases when joint operations or several bases are involved.
But as anyone in the air operations space knows, plans inevitably change, often at a moment’s notice. Once again, the cycle of phone calls, Excel updates and email begins.
While ultimately this ‘back of house’ effort to keep everyone informed and updated ‘works’, it severely impacts the time that could be spent on higher-value tasks, and as operational tempos increase, responsiveness and time are becoming an even greater commodity.
Developed in consultation with Australian, Canadian and British ex-military Commanders, Flight Schedulers and Operations Officers, TAMS combines forward planning, airspace visualization and communications and can be configured to display multiple sources of data such as ADS-B, NOTAMs, weather, and information from Ocean’s own FlightPRO® platform.
While forward planning still requires the input from many stakeholders, this can now be done from anywhere TAMS is accessible, and changes can be made (by authorised personnel) at any time. TAMS aims to provide a more efficient and immediate way to plan, book and utilise airspace, reducing what used to take many hours down to minutes.
Schedulers and operations staff are instantly notified of changes, and conflicts can be negotiated and resolved from within the application itself. TAMS will also provide on-screen and audio-based conflict identification mechanisms in a future release so that operators can respond immediately.
Installing TAMS across multiple bases ensures consistency of operations through the network effects of using a common platform, workflow and communication hub to help optimise airspace utilisation providing an exponential increase in efficiency.
Whilst TAMS’s focus is primarily airspace forward planning, its functionality also applies to airspace management on the day of operations – from activation and deactivation of airspace, through to near real-time airspace status, integrating with your organisation’s preferred ADS-B or other feeds.
TAMS can also be used to schedule and book ground support services, with real-time, in-app notifications significantly reducing the time it takes to coordinate and negotiate resource and asset utilisation.
This enhanced, end-to-end planning from a single screen ultimately provides clarity and enables far more efficient use of shared airspace and usage requests. It does this by reducing the double handling and inefficient communication of traditional ‘multi-channel’ methods. When integrated with other systems, such as FlightPRO®, externally altered data is automatically and accurately updated in TAMS – thereby eliminating double entry issues, increasing interoperability, boosting safety, and promoting the efficient management of scheduling, resources and areas.
Conclusion
With over 30 years of experience in military aviation operations management, Ocean has developed TAMS to address the inefficiencies inherent in multi-base, multi-stakeholder and multi-channel operations and delivered real efficiency gains in the forward planning of airspace. Says Shaun Mitchell, Ocean CEO: “Through their interactions with customers across the globe, our ex-defence aviation staff saw the whole end to end planning of airspace was an area in real need of innovation. We all take for granted using Outlook to book a meeting room for example, and we wanted to make it that simple to book and negotiate airspace in a highly complex operating environment such as an Airbase.”