The Future Event Driven World: Global Air Traffic Management

by David Luckham

Do you think you’ll ever live in a world where air traffic is completely managed globally by a system of autonomous processes? The system consists of processes executing on banks of redundant, fail-safe machines and communicating with one another across the Internet of the future. There are processes on the ground and in the air, many of them on mobile devices. It’s a very dynamic event-driven architecture. The system controls all movement of your aircraft from the time it leaves the gate until it arrives at the gate. There are humans in the loop, but most of the time their role is just to watch the system. What odds would you give of it happening in your lifetime — worldwide?
Okay, you’d bet against it – I hear you! You’re asking a lot of questions:

1. What is it?
2. Why would you want it?
3. Does the technology exist anyway?
4. How could it possibly happen?

Read on (MS word).