This paper provides an overview of the activities performed by Thales Alenia Space Italy (TAS-I) to evaluate the system capacity required for a satellite system to support the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) service in Europe. Georeferenced railway communication traffic, emulated by the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS) starting from FRMCS use cases and transportation databases, has been fed into a software tool developed in-house and implementing capacity evaluation algorithms. Multiple scenarios, based upon recent efforts aimed at comparing different solutions for FRMCS servicing via satellite [1], have been investigated. The analysis performed quantifies the amount of cumulative data traffic and spectrum resources required by the satellite system, a prerequisite information to assess its feasibility and substantiate the opportunity for further development.

Air traffic control officers (ATCOs) are specialized workers responsible to monitor and guide airplanes in their assigned airspace. Such a task is highly visual and mainly supported by 2D visualizations. In this paper, we designed and assessed an application for visualizing air traffic in both orthographic (2D) and perspective (3D) views. A user study was then performed to compare these two types of representations in terms of situation awareness, workload, performance, and user acceptance. Results show that the 3D view yielded both higher situation awareness and less workload than the 2D view condition. However, such a performance does not match the opinion of the ATCOs about the 3D representation.