ANTICIPATE

Main Goals of the Project

Air traffic management faces challenges owing to the dynamic nature of traffic and the spatio-temporal interdependencies among different airspace management tools. The lack of agile cooperative decision support tools make it hard to quickly adjust airspace capacity where it is needed most, leading to inefficiencies and delays. The EU-funded ANTICIPATE project will address this by introducing a ‘capacity-on-demand’ mechanism. This should allow for real-time adjustments in workload distribution among air traffic controllers in adjacent sectors, reducing unnecessary traffic regulations and improving overall cost-efficiency. By leveraging advanced digital tools and virtualised extra capacity, ANTICIPATE should enhance current air traffic management systems, ensuring more flexible and effective handling of increasing traffic demands.

Besides the Air Traffic Flow and Control Management (ATFCM) benefits achieved through the implementation of STAM mechanisms, the fast pace time-variant dynamic characteristics of traffic during the execution phase cannot be counterbalanced by the rigidity (technical, staff or set-up time requirements) of low pace airspace capacity mechanisms diming the possibility to implement efficient and effective “capacity-on-demand” measures where and when they are needed.

ANTICIPATE aims to extend pre-tactical and tactical ATFCM STAM with a ""capacity-on-demand"" efficient and effective mechanism to benefit of the networking airspace capacity by a fine tuning distribution of workload among adjacent sector ATCos at execution phase. It aims to avoid the unnecessary regulations on the traffic demand on the day of operation while mitigating present latent capacity inherent to a fragmented management of sectors through a network-minded management of time-stamp perishable mobile areas among sectors. Present proposal rely on the ATM digitalization and the Virtual Centres to enhance present STAM mechanisms with “capacity-on-demand” measures at operational level, paving the way to new airspace capacity management mechanism considering the constant increment on traffic demand through the pairwise adjacent-sector balancing mechanism to longer adjacent-sector chains.

CIRA Activities in the Project

CIRA is mainly involved in the definition, implementation, and validation of the CAEHO algorithm, aimed at identifying the most suitable aircraft on which to perform early handover operations in order to mitigate sector overload situations. CIRA's contributions include:

• Supporting the project lifecycle in the role of Project Risk Manager, contributing to risk identification, assessment, monitoring, and mitigation activities throughout the project.
• Implementing the core component of the CAEHO algorithm responsible for selecting the aircraft eligible for early handover actions following the detection of a sector overload condition.
• Supporting the definition and tuning of the operational parameters governing the CAEHO procedure, including the eligibility criteria used to identify candidate aircraft for early handover operations.
• Contributing to the design and refinement of the operational concept and associated procedures to ensure safe and effective integration within the Air Traffic Management (ATM) environment.
• Assessing the impact of the proposed procedure through the execution of Fast-Time Simulations (FTS) across multiple traffic scenarios and demand conditions.
• Supporting the preparation and execution of simulation campaigns, including scenario configuration, traffic data processing, and analysis setup.
• Collecting, processing, and analysing simulation outputs to evaluate the impact of the proposed solution on the defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• Contributing to the Exploratory Research Plan evaluation activities by assessing operational, performance, and scalability aspects of the solution.
• Supporting the interpretation of simulation results and the identification of benefits, limitations, and potential areas for further improvement of the CAEHO concept.
• Contributing to the production of project deliverables, technical reports, presentations, and dissemination materials.
• Supporting dissemination and communication activities aimed at presenting project outcomes to stakeholders, research partners, and the wider ATM community.

 

General Project Information

Funding Programme: SESAR 3

Start Date: 01/09/2024; End Date: 28/02/2027

Coordinating Organization: ENAV

Partners: DLR, Collins Aerospace, Fraunhofer Institute, Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”, CATEC, CIRA

CIRA Contact: Angelo Manco, a.manco@cira.it