Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems and airport systems are rapidly evolving to meet increased efficiency, safety, security, environmental and business demands . These goals are formidable and often conflicting, with new challenges, requirements and solutions. A deep evolution with radical changes of the current Air Traffic Management System is going on both in Europe, with the SESAR program, and in the USA (Nex Gen program). This is due to the need for maintaining or increasing the safety level with affordable costs and minimized environmental impact in the frame of the ever increasing traffic. New architectures are needed for modern control and traffic management systems in air and in ground operations, as well as for service vehicles on the airport surface. The related Communications, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) infrastructures permit enhanced positioning and identification means such as Multilateration (MLAT) and Wide Area MLAT (WAM), automatic dependent surveillance (ADS-B), automatic vehicles location and management.

The recent ADS-B technology, now operational in many environments, allows Air Navigation Service Providers to use high quality surveillance data for cooperating and suitally equipped aircraft. The novel Passive Coherent Location, and Multistatic Radar techniques, still pre-operational or in research phase, permit detection and location of non-cooperating aircraft.

These enhanced surveillance means are spatially distributed (i.e. with many receiving or transmitting/receiving stations) and logically distributed (i.e. with local and central processing and with fusion of different information sources, including the traditional primary and secondary radar). In this frame, new system architectures and new algorithms for integrity monitoring and for multi-sensor data fusion are required.

Innovative solutions for guidance and control functionalities on the airport surface, new system architectures, algorithms for multisensor data fusion and tracking have to co-operate efficiently with legacy infrastructures such as Surface Movement Radar.

Security and defence systems use similar algorithms for passive location of targets based on measurements of Time of Arrival (TOA) and its differences (TDOA) as well as of Doppler frequency and its differences (FDOA), possibly combined with angular/direction measurements (AOA/DOA).
The emerging “dual use” concept for surveillance and identification systems and the intrinsically commonalities of location algorithms in the different applications suggested to include the pertaining items in the Symposium topics.

Since the successful Symposia ESAVS 2007 in Bonn/Germany, ESAV’08 in Capri/Italy and ESAVS 2010 in Berlin/Germany these new system architectures and technologies are being studied, developed and deployed in large scale all over the world.

ESAV 2011 is dedicated to provide up-to-date information to researchers, operational experts and decision makers in the world of sensors and systems development, tracking, sensor data fusion, avionics and airport operations as well as of the pertaining air traffic control procedures.

The main symposium topics include:

• ADS-B implementation, services, equipage and applications
• ADS-B at airports
• Wide Area Multilateration
• Multilateration at Airports
• Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) applications to Air Traffic Management
• Safety issues, solutions and standards
• Interoperability between commercial, military and general aviation
• Integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)
• Dual-use applications (security, defence)
• Systems and Subsystems: Architectures, New concepts
• Passive location based on time, Doppler, angle Measurements
• Sensor data fusion
• Technologies (hardware, firmware, software)
• Environmental aspects (including radio propagation)
• Testing and Field Analysis, Integrity Monitoring
• Implementation plans and Operational results