Project Description

The SESAR Integrated Airport Operations (IAO) project aimed to show the benefits of air traffic management (ATM) solutions developed in SESAR 1 in an operational environment and to ease their industrial deployment. 

IAO consisted of five demonstrations: two on-board exercises and three at the airports of Nice, Budapest, and Hamburg. In those demonstrations IAO  covered ATM solutions in the area of:

• Pre-Departure Sequencing,
• Routing and planning functions for controllers,
• Airport safety nets for controllers,
• On-board traffic alerts, and
• Manual Taxi Routing.

The new solutions aim was to assist air traffic controllers in their duty to safely guide aircraft at the airport. In addition, they assisted flight crews in navigating on the ground.

Goals

IAO sought to prove and demonstrate the:

1. Operational readiness of all developed functionalities
2. Increase in situational awareness by using the demonstrated tools
3. Utility of routing and planning functions (partly with user interaction)
4. Improvement of DMAN functions with route planning
5. Benefits of Conformance Monitoring and Conflicting ATC Clearance Alerts
6. Accuracy of A-SMGCS taxi-time
7. Adherence to an acceptable controller workload with any of the new functionalities
8. Applicability of the demonstrated tools independent of specific local characteristics
9. Compliance to current standards and regulations including the involvement of respective bodies
10. Deployment and promotion of the tools developed in SESAR 1 and demonstrated in IAO

Demonstrations

The individual demonstrations were set up independently, but covered partly similar functionalities to prove their general applicability, devoid of certain local characteristics. They took place between September 2018 and March 2019 and was supported by the respective airport authorities and local controllers.

The functionalities of IAO were almost all tested in passive shadow mode. Operational data was used in real time to feed into the system under test, but information provided by the demonstrated solutions has no influence on the operational system. This modus operandi allowed the evaluation of the project’s objectives with realistic/real operational data without affecting the safety and processes of the real airport operations.

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