Local deployment of MARIA Model within BULATSA successfully completed
After just over a year and despite the pandemic that shook lives and organizations, the project to implement NAV Portugal’s “Model of ATM Reality In Action” (MARIA) at BULATSA was successfully completed.
Thanks to the successful partnership between the Portuguese and the Bulgarian ANSP, the MARIA is now a reality in BULATSA. This collaboration involved training, data collection and the modelling of the functional system used by BULATSA’s to provide ANS and MET services at both Sofia’s Area Control Center and Control Tower.
According to Nikolay Sokolov, Director of Safety and Quality at BULATSA, the model’s great potential will be used in the change management process, enhancing the scoping of the change and allowing for identification of the change impacts both within the functional system and external to the change interfaces. MARIA is very much appreciated in BULATSA as it introduces a very pragmatic approach towards safety assessment development which follows the everyday operations.
The BULATSA Director also praised «working with Paula Santos and Paulo Monteiro on all the aspects of the project – from the data collection and model development to the Safety Assessment validating the local Model was a fantastic experience», considering that their knowledge, enthusiasm and adaptiveness helped enormously towards completing the project entirely online due to the established travel restrictions.
Paula Santos, responsible for the MARIA project at NAV Portugal, highlighted in turn that the commitment and cooperation of Galina Lavrova and Marin Petrov and the ever-present support of Nikolay Sokolov were decisive in the success of this project. This support was particularly decisive as the travel ban resulted in all work having to be performed remotely, and this significantly hampered the task of collecting and validating data and modeling of the Bulgarian units.
It was a challenge that has been overcome and which required increased communication and understanding effort from both parties. In addition, the MARIA model evolved: already identified and prepared changes were validated and other improvements resulting from issues raised by Bulgarian technicians were introduced. One can say that this was indeed a fruitful cooperation», summed up Paula Santos.