Airports
Airfield ground lighting: regulators, series circuits, lamp-by-lamp monitoring, stop bars, surface guidance.
What we do
One control-system core, four fields of application.
ANTARES is a Moroccan engineering company specialising in the supervision of installations where shutting down is not an option. We start from airfield ground lighting — the most demanding environment there is in terms of safety — and apply the same principles to factories, ports and energy and water networks.
Industry
Programmable controllers, SCADA, historisation, lightweight MES. Migration and retrofit of continuously operated plants.
Ports & logistics
Container terminals, gantry cranes, quay lighting, terminal power. Consolidated supervision and equipment tracking.
Energy & water
Substations, standby generators, pumping and treatment stations. Multi-site remote management and energy reporting.
Product
ANTARES AGL-CMS
A supervision, control and management platform for airfield ground lighting, deployable across an entire airport network and interoperable with the equipment already installed — whoever built it.
- Real-time acquisition of circuit status: brightness step, current, voltage, insulation resistance, local/remote mode.
- Geographic synoptic of the aerodrome and electrical synoptic per substation.
- Lamp-by-lamp monitoring and availability rates measured against regulatory thresholds.
- National multi-site aggregation console with hierarchical permissions.
- Tamper-proof operations log and exportable, signed compliance reports.
Runway capabilityCAT IIIholdable right now
Active circuits34/362 locked out
Min. insulation28 MΩthreshold 20 MΩ
Lights out7of 4,812 addressed
in service
out of service
locked out
UrgentAdjacent lights out — runway 35R centreline, chainage 1,24004:12:07
AlertInsulation drift circuit CCR-07 — 22 MΩ, slope −4 %/month03:58:41
InfoChangeover normal → standby supply: 0.8 s02:31:19
How we work
You do not control a runway with version 1 of a piece of software.
A system that drives stop bars or runway lighting in low visibility operations is safety-related. We refuse to treat it as anything else. Our deployments advance in tiers, and each move to the next tier is conditional on a safety case accepted by the civil aviation authority.
TIER P1
Read-only supervision
Status acquisition, synoptics, alarms, historisation, CMMS, analytics, national console. No write access to controllers or regulators: the link is one-way, physically and logically.
Exit gate — site acceptance, then 6 months of continuous operation with no blocking anomaly.
TIER P2
Control of non-critical circuits
Apron lighting, de-icing areas, service road lighting, obstacle lighting. Runway, approach and stop bars remain out of scope.
Exit gate — safety case, risk assessment, changeover trials, authority approval.
TIER P3
Full ALCMS
Control of runway, taxiways, approach and stop bars, low visibility operations up to CAT III, Follow-the-Greens guidance.
Exit gate — complete safety case, demonstrated software lifecycle, in-service trials, approval.
What that means in practice
At tier P1, the control layer is absent from the delivered product — not merely disabled by configuration. That is verifiable at acceptance, and it is the only honest way to guarantee that a supervision system cannot act on a runway.
Architecture
Five levels, each independent of the one above it.
Losing the national centre does not affect operations at a site. Losing a site's supervision does not affect local control of the lighting. That rule governs our entire design.
LEVEL 4National network
National operations & analytics centreMulti-site aggregation console · availability indicators · predictive maintenance · compliance reports · historised data warehouse
upward flow only · deferred replication tolerated · no downward commands
LEVEL 3Site
AGL-CMS site supervisionRedundant active/standby servers · real-time database · synoptics · alarm management · operations log · tower, electrical room and maintenance workstations
industrial firewall · demilitarised zone · standardised acquisition protocol
LEVEL 2Control
Substation controllers and PLCsLocal control logic · hardwired and programmed safety interlocks · full autonomy if level 3 is lost
redundant fieldbus · fibre optic ring
LEVEL 1Equipment
Constant current regulators, selectors, ILCMS unitsFive brightness steps · current, voltage and insulation resistance measurement · lamp-by-lamp addressing over power line carrier
6.6 A series circuit · isolating transformers
LEVEL 0Field
Lights, stop bars, runway guard lights, obstacle lightingInset and elevated · status sensors · anemometers and transmissometers for automatic control
Why ANTARES
Four choices the major manufacturers do not make.
The global airfield lighting control market is held by three solid players. We do not claim to replace them on hardware: we occupy the software layer they leave open.
Vendor-neutral by design
A mandatory manufacturer abstraction layer: each equipment family is integrated through an isolated driver, documented and testable on its own. Adding a manufacturer never changes the core. You are no longer captive to whoever installed the lights.
The national network as an object
No platform on the market treats a national estate as a whole. Ours is multi-site from the outset: one operations centre, N airports, a hierarchy of permissions, and indicators that are comparable from one airport to the next.
Data sovereignty
Hosting on national territory, remote maintenance disabled by default and enabled on request, audit log exported to a collector under the operator's control. Source code held in escrow with a trusted third party.
Predictive, but verifiable
Every maintenance recommendation exposes the measurement, the threshold, the trend and the history behind it. No opaque score, no black box: a technician must be able to challenge a recommendation with their own readings.
Standards
We design against texts, not against impressions.
The applicable framework is set by the Moroccan civil aviation authority, which transposes ICAO standards. FAA and EASA references are used as design frameworks and as compliance arguments for export.
ICAO Annex 14 Vol. I
ICAO Doc 9157 · 9476 · 9830
FAA AC 150/5345-56B (L-890)
EASA CS-ADR-DSN
IEC 61821 · 61822 · 61823
IEC 62443 · 62305 · 60364
EUROCAE ED-153
ISO/IEC 25010
Law 05-20 cybersecurity
Law 09-08 personal data
Our safety and acceptance approach
Fail-safe behaviour
Any loss of communication, computing or power in the supervision layer leaves the lighting in its current state and reports it explicitly to the operator. No spontaneous extinction, ever.
Measured state ≠ commanded state
The interface permanently distinguishes measured state, commanded state and stale data. Any value whose freshness exceeds the configured threshold is flagged invalid — it is never displayed as valid.
Interlocks at the right level
Critical safety interlocks are implemented in the controllers, independently of the supervision software. Supervision can neither bypass nor disable them.
Next step
Let's start with a site survey.
Asset inventory, circuit drawings, data point matrix, and the real interfaceability of your existing equipment. That deliverable conditions everything else — and it has value even if you do not continue with us.