Industry standards

Our unique position at the center of the air transport community allows SITA to advance community interests and address the needs of the community as a whole.

We work closely with industry associations to define industry standards.

SITA contribution to industry standards

Aero-ID

Aero-ID addresses barriers to wide-scale adoption of radio frequency identification (RFID) and other identification (ID) technologies in the aerospace sector.

The Aerospace ID Technologies Programme is led by the Cambridge Lab as part of the global Auto ID Labs consortium. This ambitious research and development programme will be in partnership with a number of industrial organisations, including the following founding members:

Boeing
Airbus
Aviall
Embraer
Pratt and Whitney
B Ae Systems
EPCglobal
SITA

The Aerospace ID Technologies Programme complements other industry projects such as the Boeing-Airbus Global RFID Initiative and EPCglobal’s recently announced Aerospace Action Group.

SPEC2000

SPEC2000 is an industry standard used by most of the world’s airlines and aviation suppliers when ordering spare aircraft parts.

SITA has been supporting the Air Transport Association (ATA) standard since it’s inception in the late 1980’s by routing orders over its secure Type B network. A majority of the world's largest airlines use SPEC2000 for defining mission-critical operational processes. Most aviation industry suppliers have adopted the e-commerce portions of SPEC 2000 to be able to easily transact procurement data with their airline customers.

By streamlining business processes and reducing administrative costs, Spec 2000 has grown to become the backbone of the aviation industry's current e-business processes. As a result, the industry has attributed significant operational efficiencies and cost savings to the Spec 2000 system. As more trading partners embrace it, the system becomes increasingly efficient and effective.

Type X

Type X defines a new generation of ATI Messaging technology that is being adopted by the IATA Passenger & Airport Data Interchange Standards (PADIS) Board. It is based on SITA input using a model originally conceived with ARINC.

The Type X standard uses eXtensible Markup Language (XML) encoding to transport data of any format and size while ensuring compliance with air transport business practices. Type X decoupled architecture facilitates its deployment in a standalone platform or over an Enterprise Service Bus.

Type X Messaging uses the same addressing structure as Type B, which makes bridging simple between the two technologies. The IATA Type X Work Group is formalizing guidelines for Type X implementation and conversions to Type B.

Type X enables reliable and secure delivery of the XML-encoded messages and rich-data attachments using standard open-technology stacks, including MQ Series, SOAP or JMS, to access the SITA Type X Messaging switch.

XML is a special-purpose markup language capable of describing many different kinds of data. It facilitates the sharing of data across different systems, particularly those connected via the Internet.

As an Internet protocol (IP) oriented technology, XML offers the following advantages:

Supports richer message content
Widely embraced as a global standard
Simple and easy to use for non-experts
Provides for the flexible extraction of data using off-the-shelf tools (better operational analysis without the prohibitive costs of custom-designed applications)
XML development is facilitated by a large number of relatively inexpensive tools

Air traffic control standards

SITA has a leading role in developing standards for the air traffic control (ATC) sector, especially in the use of data links to aircraft, complementing to voice radio communications and providing the foundation for new generation air-traffic management.

> SITA contributions to air traffic control standards