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Case Studies
BizTalk Implementation Reduces Operational Costs and Improves Business Management Capabilities
Project at a Glance |
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RDA implemented a system for a major airline that eliminated the need for Type B 3rd party message processing, reducing overall costs and improving business management capabilities through better access to operational and strategic information on their business enterprise. |
About Our Client
RDA's client is a major airline serving over 50 cities with approximately 550 daily flights.
Background
RDA's client relies on an architecture made up of various components to communicate systematically between its aircraft, terminal, tower, and external systems using the Type B messaging industry standard. The Type B flight messaging architecture allows the airline to communicate systematically with its aircraft while in-flight or at the terminal, to communicate with the FAA, and with Air Traffic Control.
The project mission was to implement a system that would eliminate the airline's dependency on 3rd parties for Type B messaging processing. This would position the company to more flexibly leverage its operational related data to improve business management capabilities, reduce the cost of leveraging the messaging information, and help support the need to improve overall customer delight for the flying public.
Specific targeted objectives included:- Simplify the system and eliminate overlapping 3rd party vendors from the Type B message processing flow
- Reduce messaging costs
- Provide better access to tactical information
- Improve access to strategic information
Solution Detail
RDA leveraged Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and SQL Server Reporting and Integration Services to send and receive Flight Event data, aggregate it on a per aircraft basis for historical and real time analysis, and publish the data to various destination systems. RDA implemented an enterprise service bus (ESB) approach for the solution. It is made up of a number of subsystems which encapsulate and decouple business processes and interfaces.
Benefits
Our client is excited about the configurability and flexibility of the Microsoft BizTalk solution.- They are able to quickly modify the system to account for changing business conditions, providing tremendous business value.
- They can also now access operational and strategic data about flight operations that was not previously available in an easily queried format.
Technically Speaking
The Network Processing Sub-system is responsible for the receipt and distribution of Type B messages between a Type B SITA network and the Enterprise Service Bus implemented with BizTalk. Communication to and from the SITA network is accomplished over an MQ Series queue.
The Message Processing sub-system is responsible for type processing between Type B Raw XML and Canonical messages on the bus. It is also responsible for the archival of each incoming Type B message type to a persistent store.
The Reporting sub-system is broken into two categories: operational and longer-term reporting and research. Operational data is captured within business activity monitoring (BAM), and is accessed via a combination of the BizTalk BAM portal and SQL Server Reporting Services. Longer term reporting and research requirements are met by the implementation of a dimensional model aggregating messaging data from the ESB, as well as dimensional data from a number of airline data sources.
The Sabre Message Processing sub-system is responsible for the integration and exchange of data between the Sabre Flight Dispatching system and ESB. The Sabre system requires both bidirectional communications of Type B flat-file data and the publishing of non-Type B flight event data to the ESB.
The Engine Data Processing sub-system is responsible for delivering engine type data to various aircraft engine manufacturers.
The Weather Service Processing sub-system is responsible for the receipt of a weather request from the SITA network, request fulfillment and delivery back to the SITA network for ultimate delivery to the requesting aircraft.
The Fault and Maintenance Processing sub-system is responsible for delivery of Type B Fault and Maintenance data to airline systems used for tracking and scheduling of maintenance resources.
The Business Processing Monitoring and Alerting sub-system is responsible for a generic mechanism capable of subscribing to a number of message types on the ESB, evaluating monitoring rules to arm monitored events, the actions required to react to rule-based monitored events and notifications to the ESB to initiate resulting actions. As messages are received, they are fed to a collection of BizTalk Business Rules and interpreted by the Business Rules Engine.
The RDA Business Process Automation Framework consists of a collection of processes and components responsible for generalized and reusable capabilities. Examples include email notification, event logging, exception handling, configuration and operations support.
BizTalk Configuration: The system leverages two dual processor BizTalk Servers sharing a common two node clustered SQL Server in an Active/Passive configuration using the following components:- Microsoft SQL Server 2005
- Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 Release 2
- MQ Series adapter
- File Adapters systems
- WCF Adapterss
- Business Rule Engine (BRE)
- Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
- ESB guidance and reusable components from Microsoft Patterns and Practices)
- SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
