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.