Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
APPENDIX B - SERVICE DESCRIPTION
CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION ...... 2 2. PURPOSE ...... 2 3. BACKGROUND TO THE AUTHORITY ...... 2 4. BACKGROUND TO REQUIREMENT/OVERVIEW OF REQUIREMENT ...... 2 5. SCOPE OF REQUIREMENT ...... 2 6. SCHEDULING SPECIFICATION ...... 3 7. TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS ...... 7 8. SERVICE LEVELS AND PERFORMANCE ...... 14 9. LOCATION ...... 14
Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 The Department for Transport works with our agencies and partners to support the transport network that helps the UK‟s businesses and gets people and goods travelling around the country. We plan and invest in transport infrastructure to keep the UK on the move. 2. PURPOSE 2.1 The purpose of the procurement is to obtain a regular supply of domestic air schedules data for use within the Transport Direct (TD) journey planner. 2.2 The maximum contract value is capped at £75,000 with no guaranteed volumes or value other than the initial call off requirement. This estimate is based purely on previous years activity and the Department is not obliged in any way to spend up to this amount. 3. BACKGROUND TO THE AUTHORITY
3.1 The Department works on 4 main topics: transport - to make rail, road, air and water transport more efficient and effective, economic growth – to help the economy to grow, climate change – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and local government – giving local councils more power to decide how to spend public money in their areas.
4. BACKGROUND TO REQUIREMENT/OVERVIEW OF REQUIREMENT 4.1 Transport Direct is a Government programme which is improving the quality of transport information available to the public through a range of initiatives. Whilst a key public face of the programme is the Transport Direct Portal, the programme also has a wider scope. For further information, please refer to the:
Transport Direct Portal - http://www.transportdirect.info;
Transport Direct web site - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/transport-direct-features.
4.2 Transport Direct provides a public internet portal to enable journey planning for all modes of transport in Great Britain. As part of that service, Transport Direct provides a „Find a flight‟ service for the whole of Great Britain, and is looking for a data provider who can provide up-to-date schedule information on all scheduled flights within, and between, England, Scotland and Wales, including the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.
4.3 The Department for Transport (DfTc) invites proposals from organisations able to provide comprehensive domestic air schedules data. This data will be used in support of the Transport Direct journey planning „Find a Flight‟ service (see http://www.transportdirect.info/Web2/JourneyPlanning/FindFlightInput.aspx).
5. SCOPE OF REQUIREMENT 5.1 Transport Direct already provides domestic air information for the whole of Great Britain, using schedules provided under contract from a supplier. This contract is due for retender, hence this current procurement invitation. We are therefore looking for a data provider who can provide the appropriate schedules in a format described in section 6.8. Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
5.2 DfTc requires accurate and up-to-date schedule information on all scheduled flights within, and between, England, Scotland and Wales.
5.3 We are therefore looking for a data provider who can provide the appropriate schedules in a format as described at point 6.8 of this document, to ensure TD can continue to offer this information seamlessly and with no interruption to current service.
5.4 DfTc requires that the data is sent daily (working days only) and complies with an agreed interface specification.
5.5 The commencement date of the live service will be Monday 1st July 2013, and it is expected that the contractor will be ready to commence supply of this data in the specified format on that date. Bidders should provide an outline transition plan that will need to take account of any development work, and include a minimum of 2 weeks for user testing before going live.
5.6 The contract will be for an initial term of 1 year to 30th June 2014, but with two annual options to further extend the contract.
6. SCHEDULING SPECIFICATION
6.1 We will require accurate and up-to-date schedule information on all scheduled flights within, and between, England, Scotland and Wales. This will include the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. At present the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and Ireland are excluded (although these may follow at a later stage). We will not require schedules for international services (this would include any services that stop at two points within GB as well as at least one international airport, but which may not be used for the domestic journey leg).
6.2 Transport Direct Portal will require a supply of air schedule data. Two separate air schedules must be sent with each supply (one schedule for the summer season and one for the winter season).
6.3 The supplier must send the schedules to Transport Direct on a daily basis (excluding weekends and Bank Holidays), ideally to arrive with TD by midday. Each schedule will contain a full season of data and will contain any necessary updates.
6.4 Bidders must state how they would deal with situations where either a single day or a number of consecutive day's data is unavailable or cannot be transferred to Transport Direct.
6.5 An air schedule is expected to contain the following information:
6.5.1 Operating flight prefix;
6.5.2 Operating service number;
6.5.3 Operating flight suffix;
6.5.4 Time of operation (zulu); Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
6.5.5 Direction (arrival or departure);
6.5.6 Start date of operation;
6.5.7 Finish date of operation;
6.5.8 Frequency of operation (days of week on which flight operates);
6.5.9 Weeks of operation (every week, every two weeks, every three weeks, etc.);
6.5.10 Days between flight departure and arrival;
6.5.11 Service Type;
6.5.12 IATA airport code (origin);
6.5.13 IATA airport code (for the last/first port of call);
6.5.14 Terminal number;
6.5.15 Time of completion (zulu);
6.5.16 On board facilities;
6.5.17 Aircraft type.
6.6 The dataset supplied must be complete, accurate and supplied daily.
6.7 A telephone and/or e-mail help-desk service must be provided to Transport Direct staff and its contractors. All requests/queries/problems must be acknowledged and logged with a unique reference number and if an immediate reply is not possible, the caller/contact who raised the issue must be kept informed of progress. The Bidder must submit their own proposals for the provision of this service including hours of service and guaranteed response times.
6.8 INTERFACE REQUIREMENTS
6.8.1 Air Schedule Data Structure The structure of air schedule data is described below. This document describes the format and contents of data files supplied by journey based flight data aggregators. Each data file contains all scheduled airline passenger services, itemised by flight numbers, detailing the origin and destination airports and departure/arrival times. These data files are supplied as fixed-width. There is no header line in the data file. Each line describes a flight. There can be multiple lines for the same flight number, due to operating at different times on different days, for example.
Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
6.8.2 Air Schedule Data Description The following lists the data attributes received for air schedule data and are described in detail in the sections below (note that the complete list of data that exists in the Worldwide Through Flights Schedules data file is not given here. Only the relevant fields are given and described):
6.8.3 Carrier Code
This is a character string of length 3 (e.g., BA, BD, BMI, etc).
6.8.4 Flight Number
This is a 4-digit positive integer that can contain leading zeroes (e.g., 002, 143, 1234, etc).
6.8.5 Departure Airport Code
This is a character string of length 3, representing the departure IATA airport code (e.g., LHR, GLA, LGW, etc).
6.8.6 Arrival Airport Code
This is a character string of length 3, representing the arrival IATA airport code (e.g., LHR, GLA, LGW, etc).
6.8.7 Departure Time
This is the 24-hour clock representation of the flight‟s departure time.
The field is formatted as HHMM. The time is local time, so can vary dependent upon daylight saving times.
6.8.8 Arrival Time
This is the 24-hour clock representation of the flight‟s arrival time.
The field is formatted as HHMM. The time is local time, so can vary dependent upon daylight saving times.
6.8.9 Arrival Day
This is a single character, which indicates the elapsed number of days between the aircraft‟s arrival (The value can be blank, „1‟, „2‟ or „P‟, meaning „same day‟, „1 day later‟, „2 days later‟ or „arrives on the previous day‟). For domestic flights „P‟ should never occur, and the field should usually be blank.
Note, that the definition of Arrival Day is different from the Turnaround Time or days between flight departure and arrival.
6.8.10 Days of Operation Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
This is a character string of length 7, formed from the numbers 1 to 7 and the blank character, representing the days of the week. The first character equates to Monday (e.g., 1234567 shows a flight operating on all seven days of the week). A blank in the string indicates that the flight does not operate, for example „ 2 5 7‟ denotes a flight that operates on Tuesday, Friday and Sunday only.
6.8.11 Specific Aircraft Code
This is a character string of length 3 indicating the IATA aircraft code (e.g.733).
6.8.12 Service Type
This is a single character string denoting the type of the service in operation. The range of this character is currently from A to Z, the relevant values for scheduled passenger flights are B, G, J, Q and S. Other values cover such services as Freight, Air Ambulances, Aero Clubs, Charter flights, etc.
6.8.13 Available Seats
This is a 4-digit positive integer indicating the seating capacity of the aircraft.
6.8.14 Domestic/International Marker
This is a 2-character string that identifies the Domestic/International status of the flight. The marker identifies the Domestic/International „ends‟ of the flight. The ones of relevance are the wholly Domestic markers „DD‟.
6.8.15 Effective From Date
This is an 8-character string that defines the start date for a flight route.
The field is formatted as CCYYMMDD.
6.8.16 Effective To Date
This is an 8-character string that defines the end date for a flight route.
The field is formatted as CCYYMMDD.
6.8.17 Terminal Number From
This is a 2-character string that defines the terminal number that the flight departs from. The field is left justified, with no leading or trailing digits characters.
Examples are Heathrow terminal 1: „1 „, Gatwick North terminal: „N „. Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
6.8.18 Terminal Number To
This is a 2-character string that defines the terminal number that the flight arrives at. The field is left justified, with no leading or trailing digits characters.
6.9 Frequency, Volumetric and Trigger
6.9.1 Frequency: Daily.
6.9.2 Data Volumes: Approximately 1000 domestic flights per day in the UK.
6.9.3 Making an assumption that over the period of a summer or winter schedule that 90% of the schedules are periodic and described by at most 3 data records (to accommodate different aircraft and weekend times), and the remaining 10% of flights contribute 2 data records per week over the period, this amounts to (900 x 3) + (2 x 26 x100) = approx 8000 data records.
6.9.4 Each data record is 340 bytes, which results in a file size of approx. 2.6M bytes.
6.9.5 Trigger: A data file is sent daily by the air data supplier.
6.10 Availability Requirements 6.10.1 The interface must be available at the same time as the main Transport Direct Portal service.
6.10.2 The supplier must have access and/or ownership rights to the appropriate air schedules.
7. TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
7.1 Technical Introduction
7.2 Section 7.9 below details the structure of the air schedule data files received from the air data supplier and does not refer to the Portal specific header file or ZIP file packaging of this data.
7.3 The journey based schedule data files are supplied as fixed-width format ASCII text files.
7.4 There is no header record in the file.
7.5 All rows in the data files contain the flight data records, which are the operational details for each flight number. Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
7.6 Normally a repeating schedule for a single flight number is represented by one data record. However, changes to the flight schedule for the same flight number are represented by multiple lines (e.g., different effective dates, different arrival departure times on different days, different aircraft types on different days).
7.7 The end of line character is indicated by ASCII character 13 (carriage return), followed by ASCII character 10 (line feed).
7.8 Where fields contain characters, the case is insensitive.
7.9 Journey Based Air Schedule Data File Structure
7.9.1 File name
The file naming convention is as follows: xxx
There is no file header record in the file. Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
7.9.3 Schedule Data Record Structure The schedule data record is as follows, with the first character position being position 0. Field Characters Format Description 1 0 – 2 Character string Carrier Code 2 3 – 6 Positive integer Flight Number 3..4 7 – 13 N/A Unused 5 14 – 16 Character string Departure Airport Code 6..7 17 – 21 N/A Unused 8 22 – 24 Character string Arrival Airport Code 9..10 25 – 29 N/A Unused 11 30 – 33 Character string Departure Time 12 34– 37 Character string Arrival Time 13 38 – 38 Character Arrival Day 14 39 – 43 N/A Unused 15 44 – 50 Character string Days of Operation 16..21 51 – 99 N/A Unused 22 100 – 102 Character string Aircraft Type Code 23 103 – 103 N/A Unused 24 104 – 107 Positive integer Available Seats 25..37 108 – 128 N/A Unused 38 129 – 130 Character Domestic/International marker 39 131 – 138 Character string Effective From date 40 139 – 146 Character string Effective To date 41..80 147 – 338 Character string N/A 81 339 - 341 Character string Terminal Number from 82 342 -343 Character string Terminal Number to
7.10 Interface Type
SSH “Push” over TCP/IP. Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
7.11 Data exchanged
7.12 Transport Direct requirements stipulate that all suppliers providing data to Transport Direct should provide additional information with their data set. The type of additional data required includes: 7.12.1 Information for Transport Direct to determine that a full data set has been sent. This is achieved, for example, by using XML for data exchange (i.e., any missing XML tags imply an incomplete data set).
7.12.2 Control information for Transport Direct (to determine the identity and version number of the data supplier). These attributes are populated in a separate XML header file and are assembled into a zip file along with the supplier‟s data.
7.12.3 Incoming Files from Supplier
Incoming Data Zip file IF069_040_yyyymmddhhmm.zip
Filename format: Interface number: 069 for air schedule data Supplier number: 040 unique number for data supplier
Zip contents Header file Header file must exist in the zip file as “TDheader.xml” Supplier data file The data filename must match the name specified in the header file
Header file values SupplierId “040” for air schedules data supplier InterfaceNumber “069” for Air schedules in this format InterfaceNumber (version) “01” DataFeedisPresent Set to “Y” (i.e. no empty feeds expected) Filename Must match the data filename contained within the zip TimePrepared Date and time the data file is created
Domestic Air Schedules Data & Interface Specification Appendix B – Service Description
7.12.4 Header file schema
The header file is defined by the following XSD schema:
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Domestic Air Schedules Data Contract Agreement for the Department for Transport Appendix B – Service Description
7.12.5 Example Header File
The XML below (“TDheader.xml”) represents an example header file as expected within zip file.
7.13 Mechanism
7.14 The data supplier is expected to send data securely. Transport Direct have chosen to use the secure shell protocol for the transfer of data, as it is widely used and readily available.
7.15 The data supplier will require a SSH client to “push” data to the Portal. Suitable SSH clients and servers for Unix are available free from www.openssh.org. Open source SSH clients for Windows are also available from the same site. Transport Direct have tested our server software with the PuTTY client, http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/, and recommend this for use with our system.
7.16 The following details will be supplied by Transport Direct: 7.16.1 - host name/address
7.16.2 - user name
7.16.3 - password
7.16.4 - directory
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Domestic Air Schedules Data Contract Agreement for the Department for Transport Appendix B – Service Description
7.17 Files may be transferred using secure copy or secure FTP (PSCP or PSFTP in PuTTY).
7.18 SSH is used for secure transfer. A security layer as well as firewalls protects the Transport Direct Portal.
8. SERVICE LEVELS AND PERFORMANCE 8.1 The Authority will measure the quality of the Supplier‟s delivery by: 8.1.1 Delivery of data in the data fields specified; 8.1.2 Delivery of data daily on working days; 8.1.3 Resolution of problems in supply promptly within a reasonable timeframe; 8.1.4 Minimal public feedback on the quality of information provided. 9. LOCATION
9.1 Transport Direct is located at the Department‟s Headquarters building, Great Minster House, 33, Horseferry Road, London, SW1P 4DR
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