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ANTARES is a young engineering company designing supervision systems for environments where a failure is counted in lives, in hours of runway closure, or in tonnes stranded on a quay.
The context
ONDA has launched an investment programme of roughly 38 billion dirhams over 2025-2030, aimed at taking network capacity from about 34 to 80 million passengers a year: an additional hub terminal and runway at Casablanca, and extensions at Marrakech, Agadir, Tangier and Fez. The 2030 World Cup sets a non-negotiable deadline.
For airfield lighting, this produces three simultaneous effects — and it is precisely where those three effects intersect that our market lies.
Any lighting unserviceability immediately becomes a capacity problem, not only a safety one. A runway downgraded to CAT I on a foggy morning means diverted flights.
Airports equipped in different decades, by different manufacturers, with very uneven levels of monitoring — from a CAT III airport at Casablanca to regional aerodromes with minimal supervision.
Several airports moving up in operating category, which pushes lighting monitoring and availability requirements towards the upper end of the ICAO framework.
Our positioning
The global airfield lighting control market is structured around three established and competent players: ADB SAFEGATE (Belgium/Sweden), OCEM Airfield Technology (Italy) and ATG Airports (United Kingdom). Their platforms converge on a common base — constant current regulator control, lamp-by-lamp monitoring, A-SMGCS integration. Claiming to replace them on their own ground would be dishonest. Three spaces, however, remain open.
None of the three offers a unified national operations console, hosted locally, aggregating a heterogeneous multi-vendor estate across dozens of airports. Their remote maintenance and cloud tools come close, without treating the network as a whole.
Analytics remain immature across all three: plenty of dashboards, few maintenance actions triggered and justified. A recommendation a technician cannot verify changes nothing in their schedule.
Tightly integrated, often proprietary ecosystems, with vendor dependencies that operators tolerate less and less. Local hosting, code escrow, full data ownership: these are commitments, not options.
ANTARES is a software layer vendor and integrator. We do not manufacture lights, regulators or isolating transformers, and we do not resell them: our neutrality towards hardware manufacturers is what makes our abstraction layer credible. On hardware, we work with your existing suppliers — including the three named above.
How we work
No version 1 of a new piece of software drives a stop bar. We would rather lose a tender than promise tier P3 on a slide, because the first failed commissioning would also be the last.
A bid built without an asset inventory, without circuit drawings and without checking the real interfaceability of the equipment is a bid made at random. The survey is a package in its own right, with its own deliverable.
From month two, not at acceptance. Usability evaluation with real operators is a blocker: success rate, task time and error rate measured on the critical scenarios.
Requirement → design → test → result traceability matrix, and a register of waivers and operating limitations issued with every release. What the system cannot do is written down in black and white.
National hosting, complete export at any time, source code held in escrow with a trusted third party. If we disappear, your operation continues — that is the least a young company owes you.
After training, your teams handle day-to-day operation, site configuration and first-line diagnosis on their own. A dependent customer is not a loyal customer, only a captive one.
Segmentation
Product configuration and the applicable level of requirement follow from the site profile. A regional aerodrome does not need a hub's architecture — and cannot fund it.
| Profile | Characteristics | Reinforced requirements |
|---|---|---|
| Hub | Multiple runways, low visibility operations, round-the-clock traffic, SMGCS plan. | Availability ≥ 99.99 %, full redundancy, ILCMS, tier P3 target, reinforced security testing. |
| Main airport | One or two runways, sustained international traffic, night operations. | Availability ≥ 99.9 %, server redundancy, tier P2 to P3 target. |
| Regional airport | One runway, moderate traffic, small technical team. | Lightweight configuration, remote supervision from the national centre, tier P1 to P2 target, mobile application prioritised. |
Glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| AGL | Airfield Ground Lighting — the complete set of visual aids on the ground. |
| ALCMS | Airfield Lighting Control and Monitoring System — the system that controls and monitors the lighting. |
| ILCMS | Individual Lamp Control and Monitoring System — lamp-by-lamp monitoring and control, usually over power line carrier on the series circuit. |
| CCR | Constant Current Regulator — the regulator feeding a series lighting circuit. |
| A-SMGCS | Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control System. |
| CAT I / II / III | Precision approach operating categories, in increasing order of low visibility capability. |
| RVR | Runway Visual Range, measured by transmissometer or forward-scatter meter. |
| FtG | Follow-the-Greens — guiding an aircraft on the ground by sequentially illuminating taxiway centreline lights. |
| CMMS | Computerised Maintenance Management System. |
| ONDA | Office National Des Aéroports, the operator of Morocco's airport network. |
| DGSSI | Directorate General for Information Systems Security, Morocco's national cybersecurity authority. |
| OT | Operational Technology — the computing systems that drive physical processes, as opposed to business IT. |
Working with us
A pilot site, a well-documented estate, an operations team willing to spend time on HMI design. In return: a complete site survey that belongs to you, a defensible specification template, and a system your own teams know how to run.
