New projects
Based on the experience of the previous Engage Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), it will support the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking (S3JU) and contribute to the development and implementation of the SESAR Digital Academy (SDA), created by SESAR 2020 Joint Undertaking in order to train and inspire the next generation aviation workforce in anticipation of the digital economy.
Based on the experience of the previous Engage Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), it will support the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking (S3JU) and contribute to the development and implementation of the SESAR Digital Academy (SDA), created by SESAR 2020 Joint Undertaking in order to train and inspire the next generation aviation workforce in anticipation of the digital economy. In particular, the consortium will build on the platform of Engage KTN (“Engage”), taking forward the success story of its previous 4.5 years of work, drawing on lessons learned, and complementing the partnership with invaluable new partners. “Engage 2” will build on the existing brand and awareness of the Engage KTN, to deliver excellence across the elements of the expected outcomes, as delineated task-by-task through this proposal. Lean and efficient implementation from a tightly knit and highly effective consortium, whilst ensuring experienced and competent delivery, has enabled Engage 2 to maximise its potential and outreach into the ATM community and beyond, both directly through maximised ‘externalised’ budget (e.g., through funding PhDs and catalyst projects) and indirectly (e.g., through continued development of the Engage knowledge hub, or wiki, and its multiple resources). Engage 2 will deliver cross-fertilisation of knowledge from other disciplines to stimulate inputs from innovative, future-scoping and unconventional research into the domain of ATM: a focal point here is the ATM concepts roadmap, which will be developed further as a core element of the Engage wiki. The KTN will continue to forge strong links between research at the leading edge of apposite fields and establish alignment and synergies with the operational challenges facing SESAR. This will be achieved across multiple activities and underpinned by the ‘thematic challenges’ – a key success story of the Engage KTN.
The vision of MultiModX is that of a multimodal European transport system in which air and rail networks are planned and managed in a coordinated manner to maximise the efficiency, predictability, environmental sustainability and resilience of the door-to-door passenger journey.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
The goal of MultiModX is to develop a set of innovative multimodal solutions and decision support tools for the coordinated planning and management of multimodal transport networks. MultiModX is developing a multimodal modelling and evaluation framework, including a set of key performance areas and indicators, that enable a comprehensive characterisation of the impact of multimodal transport systems and multimodal solutions for a range of stakeholders.
It will improve existing indicators and metrics and complements current frameworks by more meaningful passenger-centric metrics for better measures of significant disruption (e.g., longer delays, missed connections, denied boarding, cancellations).
Green operations with Geometric altitude, Advanced separation and Route charging Solutions.
Since the early days of aviation, barometric pressure measurements have been a simple and robust method for altimetry. Two drawbacks exist though: there is no direct reference to terrain, and the constant variations in pressure caused by the weather lead to increased vertical profile variability restricting capacity and flight efficiency in today’s high traffic density. One goal of Green-GEAR thus is to investigate the environmental potential of geometric altimetry enabled by satellite navigation, increasing safety and eliminating waste of airspace by removal of the transition layer and supporting more environmentally friendly climb and descent operations.
With the safety case for the change of separation definition already open, not only integration of manned aviation with drones (that are already using geometric altimetry in current operations) can be addressed but Green-GEAR will also look at the potential for increasing capacity through reduced vertical separations enabled by geometric altimetry.
Last but not least the project, will investigate the potential of environmentally driven route charging, with new mechanisms for charging airspace users to incentivise minimum climate impact. Route charging will reward those who avoid volumes of airspace with a high climate impact and disincentivise flight planning through high demand sectors / flight altitudes except where it optimises environmental benefit overall, while being cost neutral to airspace users and passengers on average. Added capacity in the “greener” volumes of airspace enabled by reduced vertical separations limits necessary flight plan modifications, furthering acceptance of the approach.
The combination of these three topics in Green-GEAR not only raises substantial synergies and ensures a harmonised approach; it also allows to identify and solve possible interoperability issues quickly and to mature the interdependent solutions in sync, reducing time to market for any and all of them.
Green-GEAR on CORDIS
SESAR3 ATM Master Planning and Monitoring.
The Master Planning and Monitoring project (so called AMPLE3 ) is to support the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking (S3JU) in planning and reporting on deployment activities in deployment (covering both industrialisation and implementation), and when need be, to contribute to the update the European ATM Master Plan (MP). The project provides Content Integration (CI) service to S3JU in support of the development activities and the delivery of a coherent set of SESAR Solutions aligned at content level with the S3JU Multi Annual Work Programme direction and ambitions declined from the European ATM MP.
While earlier SESAR Programmes addressed phases A, B and C of the SESAR Vision, the SESAR 3 JU Multi Annual Work Programme (MAWP) presents the strategic Research and Innovation (R&I) roadmaps of the Digital European Sky (DES) Programme to achieve also Phase D of the SESAR Vision. The MAWP identified several Transversal Activities (TA) to make the DES Programme not just a list of disconnected projects but a coherent programme, supporting delivery of SESAR Solutions.
AMPLE3 on CORDIS
Performance Estimation, Assessment, Reporting and simuLation.
The PEARL project aims at carrying out the SESAR performance management process, under the leadership of SESAR 3 JU. This implies to reconcile and map the performance assessments and results delivered by the R&I projects with the SESAR performance ambitions in the ATM Master Plan.
To achieve this goal, PEARL will conduct the following activities:
– A priori estimation of performance contributions from SESAR Solutions
– Consolidation of performance assessments coming from SESAR Solutions to deliver Performance Assessment and Gap Analysis Reports (PAGAR)
– Provision support and guidance to Solutions through Communities of Practice (in performance domains as Operational Performance, Safety, (cyber) Security, Human Performance, Environment, CBA, Digitalisation and U-Space), as part of a Quality Assurance process
– Conduct multi-SESAR Solution network impact simulations, looking for indications of cross-effects of joint deployment
Complementarily, on specific request from SESAR 3 JU, PEARL project will maintain SESAR Performance Framework and related material, as well as providing support to Maturity Gates. It will also be flexible for the provision of additional ad-hoc activities, to be agreed with SESAR 3 JU.
PEARL on CORDIS
Completed projects
The project builds on the concept of User-Driven Prioritisation Process (UDPP) already developed by EUROCONTROL. UDPP is currently a simple way for airlines to avoid impact of massive delays on their fleet, by reordering their own flights within constraints. BEACON will study the feasibility of extending UDPP to allow multi-prioritisation processes in the airspace (e.g. encompassing departure slots, regulation slots, arrival manager slots), and exchange of slots between airlines. For this, it will build two models: a strategic model with long-term planning capabilities for the agents, and a more detailed tactical simulator to capture network effects and compute various key performance indicators.
To properly capture the agents’ behaviours, BEACON will make use of behavioural economics. Effect like endowment, loss-aversion, hyperbolic discounting and others will be explored, in order to take them into account in the design of the new prioritisation mechanisms right from the start. Different types of markets and credit systems will then be tested with the models. Special attention will be paid to issues of fairness and equity, through the use of both existing and new metrics. In particular, the project will explore the impact of the new mechanisms on low-volume airspace users.
The industrial partners of the consortium, as well as the Advisory Board, will be at the centre of the validation process. On top of the qualitative feedback expected through focused workshops, the project will also get important insights by performing two different kinds of behavioural experiments. To this end, a simple interface to the model will be built. BEACON will increase the understanding on what Behavioural Economics can add to ATM concepts elaboration and validation methodologies and will deepen and broaden the concepts of prioritisation in ATM beyond UDPP and their potential impacts on Network performance.
More on the BEACON website.
This enables the development of multiple scenarios of future mobility paths, taking into account aspects such as new regulatory contexts meeting new environmental standards, or new transport operators’ business models, covering a time horizon of 2030+. An integrated modelling approach which includes the development of data-driven models of air and ground passenger transport in Europe is implemented to assess the impact across these scenario on airside and landside processes and capacities. This provides detailed insight in the impact a complementary intermodal alignment or competition may have on the air transport sector. Using this insight into and modelling results of the future transport system, both quantitative as well as qualitative analyses, including a set of performance and connectivity indicators with specific business and operational targets and constraints, are applied to identify and assess the main gaps and barriers in achieving European (air) mobility goals. Based on these analyses, potential solutions in regard to processes, technologies and changes required to meet high-level European transport objectives are proposed, including, for example, recommending ways how air transport can evolve by efficiently connecting information and services with other transport modes to achieve the e.g. 4 hours door-to-door goal.
More on the Modus website.
The NOSTROMO project developed new approaches to ATM performance modelling to reconcile model transparency, computational tractability and ease of use with the necessary sophistication required for a realistic representation of the ATM system.
The ATM system is composed of a myriad of elements that interact with each other generating a number of properties characteristic of complex adaptive systems, which make the ATM system intrinsically difficult to model. One of the most challenging modelling problems is the assessment of the performance impact of new solutions at a system-wide level, which has been a long-time objective of the ATM research community.
The main objectives of NOSTROMO are:
- Develop a methodology for the construction of ATM performance metamodels that approximate the behaviour of computationally expensive simulation models to allow a systematic and efficient exploration of the model input-output space and a robust handling of the associated uncertainty, by exploiting the recent advances in the field of active learning;
- Implement and validate the proposed metamodelling methodology by developing metamodels of different state-of-the-art microsimulation tools able to reproduce ATM performance at ECAC level;
- Develop a set of visualisation and visual analytics tools that facilitate the analysis, interpretation and communication of the results of the new metamodels;
- Demonstrate and evaluate the maturity of the NOSTROMO approach and the capabilities of the newly developed toolset through a set of case studies addressing the performance assessment of SESAR Solutions at ECAC level. They will cover a variety of ATM phases, solutions and KPAs/KPIs sufficiently heterogeneous to allow a comprehensive benchmarking against the performance modelling methodologies currently in use, to analyse the added value and the limitations of the NOSTROMO approach and evaluate the appropriateness of its transition to SESAR IR and improvement of the E-OCVM.
Dispatcher3 developed a software prototype for the acquisition and preparation of historical flight data in order to give support to the optimisation of future flights providing predictive capabilities and advice to dispatchers and pilots. This considered airline preferences and the impact of flight missions on overall airline objectives. Dispatcher3 focused on activities prior to departure: dispatching and pilot advice on how to operate the flight.
Dispatcher3 is composed of three layers: data infrastructure, predictive capabilities and advice capabilities.
The data infrastructure will be powered by DataBeacon, a multi-sided and open-source data storage and processing platform. DataBeacon provides private environments, secure data frames, a full-stack artificial intelligence environment and a scalable highly available on-demand cluster. DataBeacon has been developed and successfully been used in other initiatives by members of the consortium. The infrastructure will allow further developments, based on data science techniques, to be built on the pre-processed datasets.
The predictive capabilities will be provided by the development of two modules: data acquisition and preparation, encompassing data wrangling and descriptive analytics, and a predictive model, which will perform target variable labelling and feature engineering, plus the training, testing and validation of machine learning predictive models for targeted airlines’ KPIs.
With the same predictions, different advice could be generated considering user policies. The advice capabilities of Dispatcher3 will be provided by a dedicated advice generator module, which will collect all the information from the predictive analytics and build a decision framework, which could be used by dispatchers and pilots.
Dispatcher3 fits within the activities of CS2 Systems ITD WP1.3 “FMS and functions” and addresses some of the high-level objectives and challenges for this ITD defined by CS2. More on the Dispatcher3 website.
Pilot3 developed a software engine model for supporting crew decisions for civil aircraft. This software provides a set of options to the pilot with information to help the crew select the most suitable one considering multi-criteria business objectives of the airline.
Pilot3 integrates airlines flight policies and overall performance targets to select and rank the alternatives. The system does not only consider the flight but the whole network operations of the airline.
Pilot3 is composed on four different subsystems: Indicators Estimator, Alternatives Generator, Performance Assessment Module and HMI. The first three will be developed during the project, while a HMI will be designed. Pilot3 will specify the software interface so that it can be integrated in larger systems.
The Indicators Estimator will provide an estimation of the different performance indicators for a given trajectory. Pilot3 will allow the airline to select how to estimate these values: using airborne information, ground information, with analysis of data and heuristics or with machine learning predictors.
The Alternatives Generator will automatically compute different alternative trajectories considering the airlines’ flight policies and its performance goals. This system will also allow the pilot to add constraints and even to specify a given trajectory to be assessed. This module will perform a multi-objective optimisation.
The Performance Assessment Module will compare the expected performance of each alternative trajectory produced by the Alternatives Generator and rank them according to the overall airlines’ goals.
Finally, the designed HMI will present the information to the pilot and allow the crew to interact with the system, accepting an alternative, rejecting them (triggering a re-computation of alternatives) or adding constraints.
Pilot3 will contribute to the capture and definition of flight policies and allow airlines to define enriched policies. More on the Pilot3 website.
In CAMERA, we placed a special focus on passengers as a vital part of the air transport system. Air travel is too often observed from the point of view of its providers of mobility (airports, air navigation service providers (ANSPs), airlines, etc.), and not often enough from the passenger perspective. However, recent digital transformation has changed passengers’ expectations of air travel. Meanwhile, airports and airlines are meeting passenger demands with varying degrees of success. What is more, air travel often only considers one leg in a passenger’s journey, and the interfacing of different travel modes remains under-explored. For a passenger, cruising above the clouds is just one part of the experience. Observing the whole door-to-door chain, a typical air travel itinerary includes various segments such as accessing an airport by road or rail and moving around the terminal(s). In many passenger itineraries, the time spent in the air is the shortest part of their trip.
In order to understand the complexity of European air travel system and address the mobility challenges that system is facing, CAMERA frames the whole door-to-door travel chain as the centre of its research. This type of holistic point of view is especially important in today’s age of artificial intelligence, increased connectivity and personalised services. The importance of the passenger experience has grown immensely. Moving towards a seamless and efficient door-to-door model, instead of focusing only on the gate-to-gate part, is becoming a standard for innovation in mobility. Air transport should be at the heart of an integrated, environmentally friendly and efficient transport system. European research communities and industrial partners across all transport branches need to work together to address the critical issues in mobility of European citizens, so that future generations can benefit from reliable, efficient, resilient, safe and sustainable transport systems.
The performance framework and the innovative methodology comprises contextualising each project/initiative in terms of a multilayer, multifactor approach while using state-of-the-art tools in data management, text data mining and modelling. This integrated micro plus macro assessment approach have a heavy quantitative yet qualitative focus, which will allow us to appropriately track the progress of current EU research towards long term goals, such as the FlightPath 2050 and the ACARE SRIA. The consortium is composed by Innaxis, University of Westminster, EUROCONTROL, Bauhaus Luftfahrt and DeepBlue, active members in ACARE groups (WG1, IRG and other WGs too). CAMERA partners are also involved- either coordinating or as full partners- in the recent mobility H2020 transport CSAs and mobility-related projects such as DATASET2020 and Mobility4EU, and in other successful ACARE CSAs: OPTICS and COREjetfuel. CAMERA will be supported by an ample Advisory board covering virtually all mobility subdomains, means of transport and stakeholders: manufacturers, operators, airports, ANSPs, industry, passengers, authorities, academia, rail transport, research, maintenance, urban transport. Three additional advisory board seats are pre-booked to interested ACARE WG1 members: one to its representative, and two ones to active WG1 members not yet part of consortium/advisory board. More on CAMERA website.
Engage was managed by a consortium of academia and industry, with the support of the SESAR JU, to promote and facilitate the development of air traffic management research in Europe.
The focus was two-fold: inspiring new researchers and helping to align exploratory and industrial research, through a wide range of activities and financial support actions.
Engage served as an outward-facing network, advancing innovation and collaboration, with new industry partners always welcome to participate.
Previous attempts to involve industry in the earlier maturity phases of ATM research have only partly been successful. We recognise that additional actions and incentives are necessary. With a balanced consortium, permeating all features of our proposal is the pronounced and active engagement of industry partners. At the core of the network are thematic challenges, supported by dedicated workshops. Catalyst funding will support focused projects, thus stimulating the transfer of exploratory research results towards ATM application-oriented research. This approach is enabled by the budget released through our lean management and compact consortium team. The network will establish a knowledge hub, in which members across the research community are continuously involved. This will include an observatory and undertake the role of devising and maintaining the long-term roadmap development of innovative and interdisciplinary ATM concepts beyond SESAR 2020. The knowledge hub will be the one-stop, go-to source for information in Europe. Our vision of the network is that of an enduring partnership between academic, operational and industrial partners exchanging needs, ideas and information to ensure the relevance and applicability of research and uptake of new concepts and methods. More on Engage website.
The overall objective of Domino was to develop a set of tools, a methodology and a platform to assess the coupling of ATM systems from a flight and a passenger perspective. The platform allowed ATM system designers to gain insight on the impact of applying new mechanisms. It provides a view of the impact of deploying solutions in different manners, e.g., harmonised vs. local/independent deployment, and information on the criticality of elements in the system and how this might be different for different stakeholders.
Vista examined the effects of conflicting market forces on European performance in ATM, through the evaluation of impact metrics on four key stakeholders, and the environment. The project comprised a systematic, impact trade-off analysis using classical and complexity metrics, encompassing both fully monetised and quasi-cost impact measures.
The primary objective of the Airport Economic Value project was to assess the value of additional passengers or additional capacity at an airport. It was aiming to qualify and quantify the main relationships and trade-offs between capacity, quality of service and profitability. This study provided a better understanding of the interdependencies of various KPIs and assessed the existence and behaviour of an airport economic optimum, in a similar way to the early 2000s, when estimating the economic en-route capacity optimum.
In order to do this, the project built a functional model based on supply and demand curves. The implementation followed a data-driven approach. The modelling decisions were supported by a literature review and data analysis only; the latter encom-passes multiple techniques from knowledge discovery, clustering and factor analysis, among others. Most of the more technical details have been presented in annexes.
DATASET2050 (DATA driven approach for a Seamless Efficient Travelling in 2050) provided, through a data science approach, insight on how the European transport architecture (connections, business models, regulations, processes, infrastructure) could adapt to the evolution of the customer profiles and expectations.
The Advisory Council for Aviation Research and Innovation in Europe, through the SRIA, identified a certain number of areas, fully aligned with the FlightPath 2050 report, where policy support is needed in current European Transport system. The reality is that even with current traffic levels (which is expected to grow steadily in the next decades), the current door-to-door travel experience involving air transport is far from being seamless and predictable. A novel concept foundation, that includes specific performance indicators of the air transport phase, including accessibility to the air transport infrastructures is needed. This architecture should provide insights on the current status of the holistic goal set up by the FlightPath 2050 vision (i.e. 90% of the passengers not farther than 4 hours from anywhere in Europe). In order to fulfil this FlightPath 2050 vision, providing those metrics and indicators from the passenger perspective is a must (vs. the “flight perspective” that usually is studied).
Furthermore, passengers profiles evolved significantly in the last decades which is generally too complex to be analyse with traditional tools like surveys or questionnaires and demographics and financial markets in the next decades introduce additional uncertainty in the assessments, especially if forecasts are done through traditional extrapolation techniques. New tools and datasets and a “data-driven air transport architecture” is needed, to ensure that the design of the future air transport is highly adaptive and aware of the societal needs and expectations. Future customer demand must match both the future physical infrastructure and future models and processes. More on DATASET2050 website.
The primary objective of ComplexityCosts was to better understand ATM network performance trade-offs for different stakeholder investment mechanisms, designed to mitigate disturbance. The selected mechanisms were: improving sector capacity with ATCO hours; dynamic cost indexing; A-CDM; and, improved passenger reaccommodation. Mechanism adoption was modelled according to three uptake levels: baseline (current situation), early adopters (mid-term) and followers (long-term). Uncertainty was modelled as background (baseline) ATFM disturbance, and, explicitly as local and disperse industrial action and weather. Dedicated performance metrics were used to assess the impacts of the mechanisms.
Dedicated performance metrics were used to assess the impacts of the mechanisms: flight-centric, passenger-centric and cost-centric, plus a newly-developed metric for cost resilience. Despite uncertainty being one of the main factors generating reduced performance, behaviours are often driven by complex interactions and feedback loops that render it difficult to assess second-order impacts at a network level. Feedback loops in the stochastic, layered, network simulation model potentially generate new emergent macroscopic behaviour. Embracing the non-linearities of complexity, thus significantly advancing the state of the art, ComplexityCosts sought to quantify, and improve the understanding of, complex interdependencies that are often overlooked in trade-off models.
DCI – 4H D2D was a follow-up of the CASSIOPEIA project.
CASSIOPEIA/Complex Performance developed a new conceptual framework to broaden the understanding of the ATM system upon the conviction that it behaves as a complex system. It provided a modelling and simulation platform which should ultimately serve to understand the evolution of the European ATM system performance in different scenarios.
ATM performance results from the set of interactions between a large number of heterogeneous elements, at several temporal and spatial scales. The non-trivial interdependencies between stakeholders, operations, technologies, policies, and market conditions configure a complex landscape whose behaviour is not straightforwardly predictable. The goal of CASSIOPEIA/Complex Performance is to deepen the understanding of the ATM system behaviour by means of Complex Systems methods. The project will develop a virtual laboratory to foresee the system reaction upon specific case studies of different nature, whose outcomes could allow the identification of relevant patterns and emergent behaviour.
CASSIOPEIA/Complex Performance will explore the potential of integrating Complexity Science elements, such as Agent Based Modelling, Game Theory, or Stochasticity, to model the actions and interactions of a group of heterogeneous stakeholders – mainly airlines, ANSPs, and airports – whose interests are not only very different but often conflicting. ATM performance will be the result of this interplay, which will acquire an increasing relevance as ATM evolves towards more flexible and decentralized concepts of operation, with higher levels of stakeholders’ autonomy. The decision making process, based on the expected reward, the past experience of stakeholders, and the subsequent learning mechanisms, crucially depends on the access and flow of information of the interested parts.
The emergence of unplanned events within the ATM system, such as delays and congestion, suggests that the current modelling approaches do not properly capture the nature of the ATM behaviour. There is a consensus in the ATM community that the current tools and methods fail to allow inference of causal and temporal relations between ATM elements and performance indicators. It is even an open question whether certain phenomena respond to causal dependencies between isolated elements or one should rather look for more intricated interdependencies. The numerous, simultaneous interactions between pairs or groups of heterogeneous stakeholders at several scales may give rise to emergent phenomena not accounted for by classical methods. Those are the fingerprint of Complexity, which, together with the lack of predictability of aspects such as weather or crew absence, make the ATM system appealing to be explored from a novel approach based on Complexity Science.
CASSIOPEIA/Complex Performance aims at identifying and capturing the salient features of the ATM system. The project will focus on faithfully recreating the physical, operational, and external factors which configure the scenario where stakeholders act. The modelling of the stakeholders decision-making processes plays a principal role in the logical description of the system.
This logical understanding of the ATM behaviour will be later translated into a demonstrative software system, flexible enough to allow end-users to design their case studies. The project will include a number of case studies. The case studies will serve the three-fold purpose of easing validation of the model, enhancing its reliability, and encouraging its use to investigate the impact of future ATM scenarios on the performance of the European ATM system. The case studies included in the project will encompass regulatory, operational, and technological changes.
Actual stakeholders as well as ATM researchers will be consulted along the project execution to ensure a faithful modelling and to define interesting scenarios for the case studies.
The CASSIOPEIA/Complex Performance Consortium brings together the complementarity set of skills and areas of expertise required for the execution of the project: ATM economics and performance (University of Westminster, Air Transport Department of the UPM), complex systems modelling and simulation (Innaxis), and multiagent software systems (Artificial Intelligence Department of the UPM).
POEM (Awarded SESAR “Outstanding Project” award), studied the propagation of delay through the network – a significant and costly operational challenge to air traffic management. There remains a growing political emphasis in Europe on service delivery to the passenger, and passenger mobility, yet metrics are flight-centric rather than passenger-centric. To counter this, the POEM project built the first European ATM model that combined flight data with explicit passenger itineraries and delay cost estimations. Drawing in part on complexity science, new performance metrics were developed to explore delay propagation, complementing the new passenger-centric metrics.
Under a range of flight and passenger prioritisation scenarios, key objectives were to explore the trade-offs between these metrics, and to better characterise the propagation of delay through the network. High-level conclusions from the project were that: (i) simple flight prioritisation rules, e.g. based on passenger numbers, were ineffective; (ii) policy-driven rules only made an impact when current airline constraints were relaxed; (iii) airline cost minimisation rules resulted in win-win outcomes; (iv) passenger-centric metrics are needed to see the full impacts of operational change; (v) reactionary (knock-on) delay in the network, accounting for almost half of all delays in Europe, was better characterised by the POEM analyses.