The project focuses on improving and sharing the local and regional air traffic intelligence to:
- optimise the use of airspace capacity
- improve air traffic controller (ATCO) productivity
- reduce delays
- improve predictability
- improve service quality for airspace users and passengers
The project partners are developing several solutions to achieve the goal of creating a powerful distributed network management function and enabling a more flexible response to traffic demand and regional/local performance objectives. One of the solutions – DAC - is enabling more flexible response to traffic demand and regional or local performance objectives. SINTEF provides novel DAC technology including controller working position and a web-based service offering DAC suggestions.
Two main challenges for Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) working in the DAC environment are maintaining good situation awareness and addressing increase of workload due to sectorisation change. To address these challenges SINTEF has developed:
- SIMADES Control Working Position for ATCOs (SIMADES CWP) that is tailored for DAC environment. It provides various novel mechanisms enhancing the ATCOs’ situational awareness during sectorization changes. SIMADES CWP helps understanding both the changes in the airspace and how these changes affect the air traffic.
- Dynamic Airspace Configuration Algorithm that is a fast-performing web-based service providing DAC suggestions and DAC activation messages. It combines use of Deep Neural Network that produce workload and complexity estimates from the traffic observations with an unconstrained optimization algorithm. This approach allows workload balancing, flexibility with respect to multiple key indicators, and have a quick response time.
- Performed a human-in-the-loop real-time simulation to evaluate operation feasibility and the benefits of the developed solutions in collaboration with ENAV, IDS AirNav and EUROCONTROL. It has been carried out on the high complexity FRA environment of Milan ACC airspace with 17 flow managers and ATCOs from Italy and Norway.
Here you can find Chief Scientist Amela Karahasanovic's presentation How to support ATCOs in Dynamic Airspace Configurations Environment from SESAR 2020 Showcase, a Europe for Aviation theatre, at Airspace World 2023.
Read more about the project here.
