ASTERIX (short for ''All Purpose Structured Eurocontrol Surveillance Information Exchange'') is a standard for the exchange of

air traffic services In aviation, an air traffic service (ATS) is a service which regulates and assists aircraft in real-time to ensure their safe operations. In particular, ATS is to: * prevent collisions between aircraft; provide advice of the safe and efficient co ...

(ATS) information. It is developed and maintained by the

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...

an ATS organization

Eurocontrol The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, commonly known as Eurocontrol (stylised ''EUROCONTROL''), is an international organisation working to achieve safe and seamless air traffic management across Europe. Founded in 1960, Eu ...

. ASTERIX is surveillance

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...

format which is being adopted by the world users

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, villag ...

as the universal

standard Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object ...

in this

domain Domain may refer to: Mathematics *Domain of a function, the set of input values for which the (total) function is defined ** Domain of definition of a partial function **Natural domain of a partial function **Domain of holomorphy of a function *Do ...

today. ASTERIX is an extensible standard with a number of different categories, each of which deals with one particular kind of information. These include target reports from surveillance sensors such as

radar Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, w ...

s as well as processed information such as aircraft tracks and various system status messages. Each category defines a number of data items which can be transmitted in a message. Which of these items are transmitted is defined in a User Application Profile (UAP), usually the default UAP provided by the standard document for the category, but optionally a more specialised UAP negotiated between sender and receiver separately. Each system/sensor using the ASTERIX data format is assigned a unique identifier composed of two 8 bit values, the '' System Area Code'' (SAC) and the ''System Identification Code'' (SIC). The ANSP selects the SIC, but the SAC is assigned globally to system operators by

(see external link).

External links

ASTERIX page
at Eurocontrol
System Area Codes (SAC) List (worldwide)

AsterixInspector
open source software displays the contents of ASTERIX files
ASTERIX Toolkit
free software that can record, replay, decode and display the ASTERIX data.
RAPS-3
commercial tool to validate ASTERIX conformance (among other functionality)
OpenATS jASTERIX
open source library (C++), decodes into JSON
GitHub

OpenATS COMPASS
open source air-traffic surveillance data display
GitHub

asterix-specs
open source asterix specifications in structured formats, including json
GitHub
Air traffic control systems Telecommunications-related introductions in 1988 {{aviation-stub