Service Contract Manager, SCM, represents the solution for the definition and management of flight and attendence services and the relative operating contracts between the various players in the airport scenario.

Each contract covers one or more services, specifically required for certain aircraft, routes and destinations. This information is provided in the phase of association of each service with a contract, a phase in which operational details are associated with administrative and contractual aspects.

The Services Configuration allows the definition and management of the registry of the services specifically requested for certain flights, called flight services, and of the services scheduled over time and in general independent of the activities of the individual flights, ie the attendece services.

The definition of an operating service is generally valid, regardless of the single contract to which it can be applied and defines the resources necessary for its own provision. The activation times and the duration of the services related to the resources represent the parameters for the calculation of the occupations of the infrastructural, staff and GSE resources. Operational services can be characterized both as attendence services and as services related to flights.

The attendece services differ from the flight services mainly due to their temporal nature, since allocation and duration depend on a disbursement schedule and not directly on individual flights. Each flight service, on the other hand, is characterized by one or more start / end events, because the service starts and ends when at least one event occurs. The start events can be of type: flight, infrastructural or preparatory, ie an event that signals the end of a given service. The end-of-service events, on the other hand, can only be of the type: flight or infrastructural, but not preparatory, in order to avoid loop situations.

Since with the definition of a new service the event of the end of delivery is automatically available, the events that can be used to configure new services are of two types:

• basic events
  • flight events (block on, block off, etc.)
  • infrastructural events (eg closing a gate)
• end of service events

Each flight service may have one or more modes of execution, as time and resources may depend on the type of aircraft. For each mode of operation of an operating service, the temporal constraints are:

1. Minimum start time (TImin), expressed in terms of offset (constant value) with respect to a given event (flight, infrastructure, prerequisites)

2. Maximum start time (TImax), always expressed as offset (constant value) with respect to a given event (flight, infrastructure, prerequisites), which is not necessarily the same as in the previous point

3. Maximum end time (TFmax), expressed in terms of offset (constant value) with respect to an event (flight or infrastructure)

4. A minimum service duration (Dmin), expressed by a constant value

5. A maximum service duration (Dmax), expressed by a constant value (by default equal to TFmax-TImin).

To these parameters are added the times of arm and disarmament (constant values) that are managed as additional attributes of the service. Finally, for each method of completion, it is necessary to define, in general, the following requirement parameters, which can be constant values ​​or formulas.

The Contracts Configuration, on the other hand, allows managing the registry of operational contracts between a contractor, which may be an airline or carrier, a handling company, an airport authority, and a counterparty, which may be another airline , carrier or handling company. The module also allows you to associate one or more flight and / or attendece services to an operating contract.