EPISODE 3 - Eurocontrol

Episode 3

D3.4-01 - Collaborative Planning Results and Consolidation

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Issued by the Episode 3 consortium for the Episode 3 project co-funded by the European Commission and Episode 3 consortium.

EPISODE 3 Single European Sky Implementation support through Validation

Document information Programme Sixth framework programme Priority 1.4 Aeronautics and Space

Project title Episode 3

Project N° 037106

Project Coordinator EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre

Deliverable Name Collaborative Planning Results and Consolidation

Deliverable ID D3.4-01

Version 1.00

Owner Pablo Sánchez-Escalonilla Aena

Contributing partners EUROCONTROL, DSNA, NLR, Ineco, Isdefe

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DOCUMENT CONTROL Approval

Role Organisation Name

Document owner AENA Pablo Sánchez-Escalonilla

Technical approver AENA Philippe Leplae

Quality approver EUROCONTROL Frédérique Sénéchal

Project coordinator EUROCONTROL Philippe Leplae

Version history

Version Date Status Author(s) Justification - Could be a

reference to a review form or a comment sheet

1.00 17/12/2009 Approved Pablo Sánchez-Escalonilla

Approval of the document by the Episode 3 Consortium.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY........................................................................................................... 8 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 10

1.1 BACKGROUND............................................................................................................ 10 1.2 PURPOSE OF THE DOCUMENT ..................................................................................... 10 1.3 INTENDED AUDIENCE.................................................................................................. 10 1.4 DOCUMENT STRUCTURE............................................................................................. 11 1.5 GLOSSARY OF TERMS................................................................................................. 11 1.6 KEY DEFINITIONS ....................................................................................................... 13

2 CONTEXT & SCOPE ...................................................................................................... 14 2.1 STATUS OF CONCEPT DEFINITION AT THE END OF SESAR DEFINITION PHASE .............. 14 2.2 SCOPE OF EP3 WP3 ................................................................................................. 15 2.3 RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER PROJECTS........................................................................ 17

3 VALIDATION ACTIVITIES IN THE PLANNING PHASE................................................ 18 3.1 OBJECTIVES .............................................................................................................. 18 3.2 VALIDATION METHODOLOGY........................................................................................ 18 3.3 VALIDATION TOOLS & TECHNIQUES ............................................................................. 19

4 RESULTS ON CONCEPT VALIDATION........................................................................ 22 4.1 SHORT TERM PLANNING AND EXECUTION PHASE. BUSINESS TRAJECTORY MANAGEMENT AND DYNAMIC DCB................................................................................................................ 22

4.1.1 Context............................................................................................................. 22 4.1.2 Roles & Responsibilities .................................................................................. 22 4.1.3 Key Findings about concept detailing.............................................................. 23 4.1.4 Supporting tools............................................................................................... 24 4.1.5 Open issues and Maturity level ....................................................................... 25 4.1.6 Performance Assessment................................................................................ 25

4.2 MEDIUM & SHORT TERM PLANNING. AIRSPACE ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT....... 26 4.2.1 Context............................................................................................................. 26 4.2.2 Roles & Responsibilities .................................................................................. 26 4.2.3 Key Findings about concept development....................................................... 27 4.2.4 Supporting tools............................................................................................... 27 4.2.5 Open issues and Maturity level ....................................................................... 28

4.3 MEDIUM & SHORT TERM PLANNING. COLLABORATIVE AIRPORT PLANNING.................... 28 4.3.1 Context............................................................................................................. 28 4.3.2 Roles & Responsibilities .................................................................................. 29 4.3.1 Key Findings about concept development....................................................... 30 4.3.2 Supporting Tools.............................................................................................. 30 4.3.3 Open issues and Maturity level ....................................................................... 31

4.4 LONG-TERM PLANNING .............................................................................................. 32 4.4.1 Key Findings on the Concept development and Maturity................................ 32

5 RESULTS ON VALIDATION TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES ........................................... 33 5.1 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................... 33 5.2 EXPERT GROUPS ....................................................................................................... 33

5.2.1 Applicability and Gaps ..................................................................................... 33 5.2.2 Practical recommendations on EG implementation ........................................ 34

5.3 GAMING HUMAN-IN-THE-LOOP TECHNIQUES ............................................................... 35 5.3.1 Applicability and gaps ...................................................................................... 35 5.3.2 Practical recommendations on Gaming implementation ................................. 36

5.4 MODELLING TECHNIQUES FOR CDM PROCESSES........................................................ 37 5.4.1 Applicability and gaps ...................................................................................... 37 5.4.1 Practical recommendations on CDM Processes model implementation......... 37

5.5 ANALYTICAL (MACRO) MODELLING FOR NETWORK PERFORMANCES............................... 38 5.5.1 Applicability and gaps ...................................................................................... 38

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5.5.2 Practical recommendations on analytical macromodel implementation.......... 38 6 CONCLUSIONS .............................................................................................................. 39

6.1 CONCEPT CLARIFICATION............................................................................................ 39 6.2 INNOVATIVE VALIDATION TECHNIQUES.......................................................................... 40

7 RECOMMENDATIONS ................................................................................................... 42 8 REFERENCES AND APPLICABLE DOCUMENTS....................................................... 43 9 ANNEX I - SUMMARY OF THE COLLABORATIVE NETWORK PLANNING EXPERT GROUP REPORT (D3.3.1-02) ................................................................................................ 44 10 ANNEX II - SUMMARY OF THE ANALYSIS OF THE SESAR COLLABORATIVE PLANNING INFORMATION: DEMAND AND CAPACITY (D3.3.1-03).................................. 54 11 ANNEX III - SUMMARY OF THE AIRPORT DATA EXCHANGE EXPERT GROUP (D3.3.1-04)............................................................................................................................... 61 12 ANNEX IV - SUMMARY OF THE COLLABORATIVE AIRPORT PLANNING EXPERT GROUP REPORT (D3.3.1-05) ................................................................................................ 63 13 ANNEX V - SUMMARY OF THE SIMULATION REPORT ON BUSINESS TRAJECTORY MANAGEMENT AND DYNAMIC (D3.3.2-02)............................................... 70 14 ANNEX VI - SUMMARY OF THE SIMULATION REPORT ON AIRSPACE ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT (D3.3.3-02) ............................................................. 79 15 ANNEX VII - SUMMARY OF THE SIMULATION REPORT ON COLLABORATIVE AIRPORT PLANNING (D3.3.4-02) ......................................................................................... 95 16 ANNEX VIII - SUMMARY OF THE SIMULATION REPORT ON GLOBAL PERFORMANCES AT NETWORK-WIDE LEVEL (D3.3.5-02)............................................ 104

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LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Summary of EP3 WP3 Validation Activities ............................................... 21 Table 2: List of Operational Scenarios..................................................................... 47 Table 3: Proposed AOP themes.............................................................................. 66 Table 4: Impact of Local OIs in KPAs .................................................................... 112

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Scope of the EP3 WP3 area in relation to SJU operational concept

components ..................................................................................................... 17 Figure 2: Business Trajectory Management and interaction with Dynamic DCB...... 24 Figure 3: Integrated aircraft and passenger monitor ................................................ 31 Figure 4: Expert Group applicability......................................................................... 34 Figure 5: Gaming applicability ................................................................................. 36 Figure 6: Collaborative Planning Validation Tools ................................................... 41 Figure 7: Sequence of validation activities in EP3 WP3........................................... 46 Figure 8: EP3 WP3.3.1 Relations with EP3 WP3 Validation Exercises.................... 47 Figure 9: Identified Actors........................................................................................ 56 Figure 10: ATM Planning phases ............................................................................ 64 Figure 11: Local passenger process time analysis .................................................. 67 Figure 12: FABs in the ECAC area.......................................................................... 72 Figure 13: Overview of the dynamic DCB process................................................... 73 Figure 14: Spanish-Portugal FAB............................................................................ 81 Figure 15: Proposed VGA shape from OS-34.......................................................... 82 Figure 16: Story Board of the Simulation Scenarios: Location, Refinement and

Cancelation of a VGA....................................................................................... 83 Figure 17: Share Use of airspace is conflicting with Capacity.................................. 87 Figure 18: Sequential Process ................................................................................ 89 Figure 19: ‘Parallel’ Process.................................................................................... 89 Figure 20: What-if tool............................................................................................. 91 Figure 21: Optimal Process..................................................................................... 93 Figure 22: Hamburg airport ..................................................................................... 96 Figure 23: Traffic characteristics.............................................................................. 97 Figure 24: Aggregated Kernel Network scenario ..................................................... 97 Figure 25: Powerwall design ................................................................................... 98 Figure 26: Experimental Setting .............................................................................. 99

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Figure 27: Main airports, aggregated airport nodes and out-nodes in the route network of Europe.......................................................................................... 102

Figure 28: AT - ECAC network as a Complex System........................................... 106 Figure 29: Example of ATM-NEMMO G.U.I........................................................... 109 Figure 30: Application of OIs related to Short-Term Planning and Execution Phases

....................................................................................................................... 109 Figure 31: Simulation Scenarios spanning tree ..................................................... 110 Figure 32: SS1 Departure Delay due to Internal Uncertainty ................................. 111 Figure 33: SS2 Arrival Delays, grouped by Level of Uncertainty............................ 111 Figure 34: SS7 Daily Number of IFR Flights & Hourly Throughput Overloads ....... 113

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This deliverable's purpose is to integrate the results from all Episode 3 (EP3) validation activities dealing with the planning phase. The document is intended for the European Commission who sponsored the EP3 project, for the ATM validation community who will have lessons learnt and recommendation on the correct use of validation techniques, and especially for the SESAR Joint Undertaking who will have at its disposal key findings to assist during the SESAR Development Phase (2008-2013).

Recognising that the collaborative planning was at a relatively early stage in the Concept Validation Lifecycle, this work package focused its activities on the following objectives:

• Clarification of the concept, recognising that the concept is large and that EP3 does not have the resources to address the entire SESAR concept. As a consequence, the biggest part of the effort was focused to the short-term and partially medium-term phase;

• Expanding the repertoire of cost-effective validation techniques suited to these early stages of concept validation;

• Consolidating EP3 Work Package 3 (WP3) partners’ knowledge on the application of the E-OCVM and increasing their validation experience.

EP3 WP3 explored three main aspects of the SESAR concept: the management of arrival traffic congestion in the short-term planning and execution phases; the Advance Flexible Use of Airspace when military users request a new airspace reservation; and the agreement of collaborative solutions through the future Airport Operations Centre.

The Expert Group-Based techniques allowed gaining greater understanding of these solutions by supporting detailed operational descriptions of the concept. Then, this work package explored innovative validation techniques that are suitable for the assessment of the feasibility of the Collaborative Decision-Making (CDM) planning processes. These techniques can be classified into those with human-in-the-loop participation (gaming techniques) and those where the processes are modelled incorporating rule-based decisions that control the interactions between the actors (process modelling techniques).

Thanks to the EP3 WP3 validation activities, the concept elements explored have been clarified and towards more detail has been added. However, there remain important areas where open issues with diverging opinions (hot topics) remain and need to be further investigated. Consequently, these concept elements can still be roughly evaluated as being at V1 of the Concept Validation Life Cycle in the European Operational Concept Validation Methodology.

As a key issue, EP3 WP3 recommends further exploring the principle of business management ownership and its interpretation in the context of Demand and Capacity Balancing (DCB) processes. The Civil Users claim their active participation in those DCB processes where the decisions affect their business trajectories. In this context, EP3 has defined a new function/role that could convey the civil users interests integrated within the decision-making cores: The Airline Coordinator.

With respect to the applied innovative validation techniques, Expert Group-Based has proved to be an effective support to the preliminary steps of a top-down validation approach. On the other side, it is difficult to think at the EG as a stand-alone validation technique. EP3 WP3 recommends incorporating gaming sessions as good practice during their meetings at early stages of the concept maturity. In this context, gaming promotes original thinking facilitating the refinement, clarification and validation of the concept process feasibility.

Although Expert Group-Based is an effective technique at an early validation stage, it is recommended that Experts should be involved in all steps of each project lifecycle as a support to other validation techniques. It is therefore possible to disseminate early the

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validation results (so increasing the stakeholders buying-in in case the validation gives a positive outcome).

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1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND In 2004 the European Commission and EUROCONTROL launched a TEN-T1 call for an industry-led project to define and plan the research and implementation requirements necessary to develop the next generation European ATM system. As a result, the SESAR project was launched in April 2006.

As part of this overall initiative, the EC 6th Framework Programme 2004 call for proposals included an Integrated Project with the target of validating a mid-term (2017) concept of operations. After a number of evolutions, the Episode 3 (EP3) proposal was submitted to the EC in November 2005. After a period of negotiation to align with the developing SESAR Definition Phase results, EP3 kicked off in May 2007 with a target to take first steps in the validation of the SESAR concept for 2020, in order to pave the way for the SESAR Development Phase work programme.

EP3 has brought together multi-disciplinary team of key stakeholders in the European ATM research community including many organisations participating in the SESAR development phase and covering aspects of the system from strategic and tactical planning through to Air Traffic Control and Airport operations.

The European Commission and EUROCONTROL launched a TEN-T call for an industry-led project to define and plan the research and implementation requirements necessary to develop the next generation European ATM system. The successful project, SESAR, started on March 2006 with its Definition Phase.

In support to SESAR, the European Commission requested Episode 3 (EP3) to orient its validation approach to provide a first assessment of the SESAR concept.

1.2 PURPOSE OF THE DOCUMENT The main purpose of this document is to integrate the results from all the EP3 validation activities dealing with the planning phase. Traceability with the exercises is ensured by including summaries of each validation report as annexes to this document.

1.3 INTENDED AUDIENCE This document is intended for the European Commission who sponsored the EP3 project, for the SESAR community at large, and especially the SESAR JU who will have at its disposal key findings and lessons learnt to advice during the SESAR Development Phase (2008-2013). In addition, this document is also intended for the EP3 audience and mainly, for the EP3 WP2 as the integrator of all final reports in the project.

The EP3 WP3 used innovative validation techniques and methodologies to explore the SESAR concept such as Gaming Human-In-The-Loop Sessions, Modelling for concepts at an early stage of maturity and Expert Group-Based techniques. Then, EP3 WP3 has undertaken investigative work to assess the use and the applicability of these new validation techniques. This assessment followed the E-OCVM [2] validation methodology. This deliverable's purpose is therefore to provide the ATM Validation Community with lessons learnt and recommendations to the correct use of the above-mentioned techniques.

1 Trans-European Transport Network

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1.4 DOCUMENT STRUCTURE The structure of this document includes the following sections:

• Section 2 describes the SESAR context and the scope of the EP3 WP3;

• Section 3 details the validation activities performed in the planning phase;

• Section 4 gathers the results of the exercises related to the Concept Validation;

• Section 5 gathers the results of the exercises related to the validation techniques;

• Section 6 describes the conclusions extracted from the validation activities;

• Section 7 describes the recommendations;

• Section 8 lists the references;

• Sections 9 to 16 address the different EP3 WP3 exercises through annexes that provide a summary of all validation reports.

1.5 GLOSSARY OF TERMS Term Definition

4D 4-Dimensions

ACCES Airport Control Centre Simulator

A-CDM Airport Collaborative Decision-Making

AFUA Advanced Flexible Use of Airspace

AMAN Arrival Manager

AMC Airspace Management Cell

ANSP Air Navigation Service Provider

AO Airline Operator

AOC Airline Operations Centre

AOP Airport Operations Plan

APOC Airport Operations Centre

ASM Airspace Management

ATC Air Traffic Control

ATFCM Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management

ATFM Air Traffic Flow Management

ATM Air Traffic Management

ATM-NEMMO ATM Network-Wide Macromodel

ATS Air Traffic Service

CAATS Cooperative Approach to Air Traffic Services

CAST Comprehensive Airport Simulation Tool

CBA Cost Benefit Analysis

CDM Collaborative Decision-Making

CDR Conditional Route

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Term Definition

CFMU Central Flow Management Unit

CHILL Collaborative Human in the Loop Laboratory

ConOps Concept of Operations

CTA Controlled Time of Arrival

CTO Controlled Time Over

D Deliverable

DARTIS Decision Aid for Real Time Synchronization

DCB Demand and Capacity Balancing

DMEAN Dynamic Management of the European Airspace Network

DOD Detailed Operational Descriptions

DoW Description of Work

EC European Commission

ECAC European Civil Aviation Conference

EG Expert Group

E-OCVM European Operational Concept Validation Methodology

EP3 Episode 3 project

FAB Functional Airspace Blocks

FAF Final Approach Fix

FP Framework Programme

GA General Aviation

HIL Human-In-the-Loop

IAF Initial Approach Fix

IFR Instrument Flight Rules

IP Implementation Package

KPA Key Performance Area

KPI Key Performance Indicator

NAM Network Analysis Model

NOP Network Operation Plan

OAT Operational Air Traffic

OI Operational Improvement

Opt ATFCM Optimising ATFCM model

OS Operational Scenario

PROMAS PROcesses Management Simulator

RAD Radar

RBT Reference Business Trajectory

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Term Definition

SBR Sub-Regional Manager

SBT Shared Business Trajectory

SESAR Single European Sky ATM Research

SESAR JU SESAR Joint Undertaken

SWIM System Wide Information Management

TAM Total Airport Management

TEN-T Trans-European Transport Network

TMA Terminal Manoeuvring Area

TOBT Target Off-Block Time

TTA Target Time of Arrival

TWR Tower

UDPP Users Driven Prioritisation Process

VGA Variable Geometrical Area

WP Work Package

1.6 KEY DEFINITIONS Controlled Time of Arrival (CTA)

An ATM imposed time constraint on a defined merging point associated to an arrival runway.

Reference Business Trajectory

The business/mission trajectory which the airspace user agrees to fly and the ANSP and Airports agree to facilitate (subject to separation provision).

Most times indicated in the RBT are estimates, some may be target times (TTA) to facilitate planning and some of them may become constraints (CTA, CTO) to assist in queue management when appropriate, e.g. at AMAN horizon. The RBT consists of a 2D route, altitude and time constraints when required, altitude, time and speed estimates at way points and trajectory change points.

Shared Business Trajectory (SBT)

Published business/mission trajectory that is available for collaborative ATM planning purposes. The refinement of the SBT will be an iterative process.

Target Off Block Time (TOBT)

The TOBT is defined in the context of SESAR as the time that an aircraft operator/handling agent estimates that an aircraft will be ready, all doors closed, boarding bridge removed, push back vehicle connected, ready to commence push back and start up immediately upon reception of an ATC clearance.

Target Time of Arrival (TTA)

An ATM computed arrival time. It is not a constraint but a progressively refined planning time that is used to coordinate between arrival and departure management applications.

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2 CONTEXT & SCOPE The Episode 3 project was tasked to contribute to SESAR by detailing critical parts of the Operational Concept and by performing studies exploring new validation techniques. The EP3 WP3 addressed the SESAR collaborative planning processes at network and airport level.

2.1 STATUS OF CONCEPT DEFINITION AT THE END OF SESAR DEFINITION PHASE

The SESAR Operational Concept was developed as part of the SESAR Definition Phase. Deliverable D3 [7] describes the ATM Target Concept as well as the agreement reached by the SESAR Consortium on the way forward as further validation and development are expected after the SESAR Development Phase.

The ConOps for 2020 aimed to initiate a paradigm shift for the ATM in Europe. The Concept places the Business Trajectory at the core of the system with the aim to execute each flight as close as possible to the intention of its owner. The key features of the ATM Target Concept are:

• Moving from airspace to trajectory focus while introducing a new approach to airspace design and management. Airspace is divided in managed and unmanaged airspace only. Intensive collaboration leads to shared and unconstrained operations by civil and military users in flexibly managed airspace structures;

• Collaborative planning is reflected by a Network Operations Plan (NOP). This plan is continuously updated by all users and ensures balanced demand and capacity taking into account the results of planning processes undertaken at regional and sub-regional level;

• The airports are fully integrated into the ATM network. Improved resource planning is expected to provide enhanced throughput and more efficient deployment of the total network;

• New separation modes are expected to provide increased capacity and throughput;

• System Wide Information Management (SWIM) is providing the backbone for information processing and sharing in support of a collaborative decision making;

• Finally, humans are central in decision making in the future European ATM system.

The Deliverable D3 [7] gave a basic outline of the concept based on these leading characteristics. In this context, the underlying architecture was detailed as well as the applicable technical enablers. This deliverable was derived from a more widely discussed elaboration of the concept, reflected by the SESAR Task 2.2.2 Deliverable [4]. Although not going into much detail, this document describes quite clearly the underlying fundamentals regarding management and planning of flights under the SESAR Operational Concept.

EP3 was initiated by the EC to further investigate where the concept was under discussion or immature. Consequently, EP3 WP3 studied the most relevant blocking points in the planning phase according to the SESAR Deliverable “Identification of limits/blocking points for airspace environment” [3]. The proposed solutions were analysed as a series of Operational Improvement (OI) steps identified in the SESAR Deliverable D4 “ATM Deployment Sequence” [8].

The preliminary analysis concluded that the majority of the SESAR Operational Improvements identified in the planning phase is at a relatively early stage in the E-OCVM Concept Validation Lifecycle. This made necessary to identify and address each aspect of the concept with validation techniques adapted to the maturity level.

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2.2 SCOPE OF EP3 WP3 As mentioned in the SESAR Task 2.2.2 Deliverable [4], the ATM planning process in SESAR foresees continuous refinement as better data become available. All authorized partners will share trajectory information as soon as a Shared Business Trajectory is available in the NOP (Network Operations Plan). This information will be available in almost real time and will be used at the required extent from the earliest trajectory development phase through operations and until post-operation activities. There is no clearly defined starting point to the process, but it certainly starts many years before the day of operation if one considers staff recruitment, training plans, or major system procurements.

In-between, network operations are planned in two phases, the Long-Term planning phase and the short-term planning phase. Planning activities do not change radically from one phase to the other, since it is a work of continuous refinement relying on a number of core principles (Plan Traffic and Airspace Demand, Plan ATM Resources Capacity, Balance Demand and Capacity). However those processes are managed differently in the two phases: they do not obey the same operating principles, do not involve exactly the same actors (or with roles and responsibilities specific to each phase) and are not driven by the same events or the same kind of information.

Recognising that the concept is large, that EP3 does not have the resources to address all areas and Operational Improvements (OIs) and because of the audit that led to a suspension of EP3 to better meet the SESAR JU needs, the EP3 WP3 scope was reduced. The new scope comprises mainly Short-Term Planning and partially medium-term planning (only the near Short-Term was covered). The long-term planning phase was only addressed through some expert group sessions with limited scale (high-level view of the main long-term planning processes).

The EP3 WP3 Validation Strategy [11] described in detail the SESAR proposed solutions for the Short-Term Planning Phase. The Expert Groups in WP3 allowed gaining greater understanding of these solutions by supporting detailed operational descriptions of the concept. This information was captured in Detailed Operational Documents (DODs) that consolidate operational scenarios and "use cases". They describe the SESAR ConOps into a format more suited to validation. In particular, the EP3 WP3 validation exercises were focused on the following DODs:

• SESAR DOD G, General Detailed Operational Description (G-DOD) [12]. It presents common definitions and acronyms, the main assumptions and principles underlying the Concept of Operations and a context for other DODs;

• SESAR DOD M2, Medium/Short Term Network Planning Detailed Operational Description (M2-DOD) [13]. It provides a refined description of the SESAR ConOps for processes taking place at network level during the medium/short-term planning phase;

• SESAR DOD M1, Collaborative Airport Planning Detailed Operational Description (M1-DOD) [14]. It provides a refined description of the SESAR concept of operations regarding Airport operational processes during the medium/short-term planning phase;

• SESAR DOD E4, Network Management in the Execution Phase (E4-DOD) [21]. It provides a refined description of the SESAR concept of operations regarding operational processes taking place at the airspace and network levels during the execution phase.

A synopsis of medium/short-term network planning can be summarised as follows. This general description provides a setting for all EP3 WP3 exercises. As the main focus is the Short-Term, all exercises assume that an agreed and stable demand and capacity balancing situation was achieved and progressively refined during the collaborative long-term planning phase (from many years ahead up to 6 months) and the medium-term planning phase.

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• Airspace Users declare their flight intentions and optimise their trajectory through SBTs following their business model. Military users declare their airspace requirements. The NOP is visible to all of them at any time;

• The airspace is organised to respect their preferences and provide enough capacity, taking into account airspace requirements;

• The planned traffic and airspace demand and the planned capacity are assessed by the Network Management function to detect potential imbalances;

• In case of imbalance, and depending on the severity of the capacity shortfall, a DCB Solution is selected in the Catalogue or elaborated with possible network impact assessment;

• The solution is then applied, resulting in capacity adjustments and possibly demand adjustments if advisories are notified or regulations are necessary. Airspace reservations are also optimised accordingly, if possible. UDPP is exceptionally triggered to prioritise flights;

• The foreseen ATM picture is reassessed after implementation of the DCB Solution;

• The DCB loop runs iteratively during the medium and short-term planning phases so that demand and capacity are balanced when SBTs become stable: the execution of RBTs can start, being served by the optimal Capacity Plan and the optimal Airspace Use Plan.

Special mention should be made of the integration of airports in the NOP. The Airport Operations Plan (AOP) is continuously refined as relevant data becomes available. Events which may have an impact on the AOP will be analysed via the APOC in a collaborative manner by all concerned stakeholders. The plan is consolidated through a process of demand and capacity balancing based on the Shared Business Trajectories and known capacity limitations at the airports or in the network. If demand exceeds capacity, the consequences are analysed and aircraft operators revise their plans through a collaborative process.

In this context, EP3 WP3 identified three main areas of research that reconcile SESAR validation priorities and stakeholder alternatives:

• Business Trajectory Management and Dynamic DCB. This area addressed the collaborative processes to dynamically adjust the demand to the available capacity in the short-term planning and execution phases. Airspace Users manage their business trajectories while taking into account these Dynamic DCB constraints;

• Airspace Organization & Management This area addressed the collaborative processes to respond to short-term military users’ requirements not covered by pre-defined structures and/or scenarios. These short-term changes imply the airspace users’ participation to adapt their trajectories to the new airspace requirements;

• Collaborative Airport Planning. This area addressed the definition of the high-level AOP content, and the airport processes associated with common understanding of a common planning process, common situational awareness and a common performance framework.

The framework of these EP3 WP3 activities within the SESAR Development Phase could not be traced when producing this document, mainly because SESAR Development Phase Work Package B (WPB from now on) has recently reached an agreement on how to define and formalise a common decomposition of the “ATM Architecture”. The status of such agreement is depicted in the following diagram, in which the scope of the EP3 WP3 activities with respect to the current definition of the ATM concept components within the Short-Term Planning Phase is highlighted in green colour.

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ATM Operational Concept

Components

Airspace Organization & Management

ATM Network Management

Separation Provision

Traffic Synchronization

Aeronautical & Weather

Information B/M Trajectory Management

Aeronautical Information

Demand & Capacity Balancing

Weather Information

B/M Trajectory Planning

B/M Trajectory Development

ATM Business Management

Conflict Management

B/M Trajectory Operations

Asset Management

Performance Management

Collision Avoidance

Figure 1: Scope of the EP3 WP3 area in relation to SJU operational concept components

2.3 RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER PROJECTS EP3 was built upon the results and experience gained in the European Commission’s Gate-to-Gate as well as other FP projects, which provided a source of validation and operational information as well as integrated validation platforms to support the assessment of the SESAR concept of operations.

Episode 3, for the first time, allowed the application of the E-OCVM methodology [2] to the validation of a whole ATM concept. This work was supported by CAATS-II project [20], which was in charge of capturing from EP3 and other projects the application of E-OCVM, which should be used when drafting future versions of this validation methodology.

EP3 WP3 Validation Strategy [11] applied the E-OCVM Step 1.2 to identify what information already existed describing any previous evaluation of the concept under examination, and to identify the current level of development of the concept. SESAR Definition Phase WP3.1 [19] performed a survey of existing ATM initiatives.

Special mention was made of the following initiatives in the Network domain, focused on the collaborative planning processes:

• DMEAN Concept of Operations (Dynamic Management of the European Airspace Network) as the baseline for the SESAR medium-term baseline;

• FAB developments (Functional Airspace Blocks);

• A-CDM (Airport Collaborative Decision Making) as the main initiative focused on improving data sharing between airports and network.

It is important to note that, although these initiatives described above are in advanced maturity levels, they do not cover all the aspects related to the SESAR Planning Phase. The SESAR Collaborative Planning Concept is at a less mature stage than in some other areas focused on the execution phase (aspects addressed in EP3 WP4 and WP5).

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3 VALIDATION ACTIVITIES IN THE PLANNING PHASE

EP3 WP3 Validation Strategy [11] describes in detail how this work package approached the SESAR Collaborative Planning Concept.

3.1 OBJECTIVES Because of the events already described in the previous chapters, and to answer the expectations not only of the EC and SESAR JU, but also of the EP3 partners, the new objectives of this work package can be listed as follows:

• Clarification of the concept, recognising that the concept is large and that EP3 does not have the resources to address all Operational Improvements. As a consequence the mayor effort was focused at short term phase and partially medium term phase;

• Expanding the repertoire of cost-effectiveness validation techniques (e.g. gaming variants) suited to these early stages of concept validation;

• Consolidating EP3 WP3 partners’ knowledge on the application of the E-OCVM [2] and increasing their validation experience.

In this context, each exercise could support clarification, explore alternative validation techniques and gain important validation experience.

Most of these exercises were defined in a local context or, in any case, did not cover the whole ECAC area. Therefore, the network effect when introducing a new Operational Improvement at ECAC level was not addressed. To solve this gap, EP3 WP3 had to provide a preliminary assessment of this network effect by extending the conclusions obtained by each exercise.

3.2 VALIDATION METHODOLOGY The validation methodology adopted in EP3 WP3 was defined following the principles of the E-OCVM [2]. While the E-OCVM represents an important step-forward in efforts to ensure an effective and consistent approach to validation, its application in EP3 to the SESAR Target Concept nevertheless presents a number of challenges.

One of the mayor issues is that the effective application of the E-OCVM implies that the choice of validation exercises and their content should be identified during the development of the validation strategy. In the case of EP3, a Description of Work (DoW) [1] already existed identifying the high-level exercise planning. This forced a trade-off between SESAR validation priorities and stakeholder alternatives. EP3 WP3 reconciled the top-down SESAR priorities with the bottom-up limitations of the Concept description and practicalities of the exercises at a given level of maturity to produce a coherent and feasible validation process.

EP3 WP3 combined several techniques in a step-by-step approach, starting with the clarification of the SESAR Collaborative Planning Processes. This preliminary work covering concept clarification was the main objective of two Expert Groups. The Expert Group on Network Planning supported the refinement of the operational processes taking place at the airspace and network levels during the medium/short term planning phase. This expert group elaborated the operational scenarios concerning the military collaboration in the medium/short-term planning and the resolution of capacity shortfalls in the short-term.

The expert group on Collaborative Airport Planning started the development of the operational scenarios for Total Airport Management, at the level of roles and responsibilities as guidance for those airports implementing the SESAR concept of operations related to collaborative

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decision making. This expert group elaborated the issues associated with performance monitoring against collaboratively agreed targets, as well as the required processes, which will permit a re-planning in the case of deviation from the targets.

This concept clarification and operational scenarios were the starting point for the next step in the EP3 WP3 validation process: the Assessment of the CDM Processes Feasibility. In this context, EP3 WP3 explored the capabilities of new validation techniques and tools suited to early stages of concept validation, such as gaming techniques. These techniques are essentially human-in-the-loop activities, but they are suitable for concepts where the aim is to improve the strategic decision making processes of the actors and as such, the impact is only felt hours or days after the decisions are taken.

Three gaming exercises addressed the CDM planning processes associated with the following aspects of the concept:

• The management of arrival traffic congestion in the short-term planning and execution phases;

• The Advance Flexible Use of Airspace when military users request a new airspace reservation;

• The agreement of collaborative solutions through the future Airport Operations Centre.

In this context, as well as targeting the processes feasibility, these exercises helped in the identification of potential functionalities of the tools to support the decisions of the actors, to explore alternative validation techniques, and to provide preliminary performance assessments for SESAR.

Finally, EP3 WP3 attempted to quantify the network effect of introducing some of the SESAR Operational Improvements in the whole ECAC area. Most of the effort was concentrated on the Operational Improvements dealing with the management of arrival traffic congestion in the short-term planning. In this area, EP3 WP3 provided not only an assessment of the feasibility of the Collaborative Planning Processes – through gaming techniques -, but also an initial trend of their impact and influence on the expected level of ECAC network performances through analytical modelling techniques.

The focal points of this systematic validation approach are the Expert Groups. Experts supported the rest of the EP3 W3 validation activities during the whole duration of the project, not only by refining the operational details, but also by supporting the definition of the exercises, and the consolidation of conclusions from the validation results.

3.3 VALIDATION TOOLS & TECHNIQUES The selected techniques and tools fulfil with the expectations of clarification of the concept at an early stage in the Concept Validation Lifecycle. Next, the main characteristics of these techniques and tools are described.

Expert Groups are validation techniques in which the opinions of a panel of carefully selected individuals with specific knowledge on an operational concept being validated are collected and may be revised, providing evidence to support the hypothesis of a validation exercise.

EP3 WP3 defined two main Expert Groups addressing the short-term planning (and partially medium-term planning) at Airport and Network level. The Network Planning Expert Group comprised experts from various Air Navigation Service Providers, from an Airline as well as a military representative.

The Airport Planning Expert Group comprised primarily experts from the airport of Palma de Mallorca. This group employed the CAST simulator as a fully integrated part of its work. The model was identified as a suitable tool for elaboration of the monitoring processes required to aid decision-making. The main objective was to permit the experts to visualize operations at

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their own airport and better appreciate the importance of shared information and stable planning.

In parallel to this Airport Expert Group in Palma, focused expert group sessions were held with Air France staff. These meetings were aimed at providing an initial description of the most useful operational information, which could be shared with the “outside world” of an airport as a means to identifying the content of an European Airport Portal, which could be used to provide a rapid view on the performance status of a particular airport.

Finally, the long-term planning phase was partially addressed through some in-house meetings to obtain experts’ feedback about the current and future ATM processes. After extensive analysis of the current state-of-art, a limited number of wider expert group sessions were held to share and consolidate the findings.

Gaming Techniques are essentially human-in-the-loop activities, but they are suitable for concepts where the aim is to improve the strategic-decision-making processes of the involved actors and as such, the impact is only felt hours or days after the decisions are made. These techniques aim at validating the feasibility of the CDM processes.

EP3 WP3 employed two different gaming methods: Paper-Based and Platform-Based. Paper-Based methods are conducted by a Game Master with the use of cards, tokens and predefined objectives for each actor. On the other side, Platform-Based methods use software allowing all actors to work together and exchanging ATM data, sharing information and taking decisions in a collaborative environment. EP3 WP3 used three different software platforms: CHILL, DARTIS and ACCES.

In the context of the collaborative airport planning exercise, the ACCES facility was combined with several modelling tools – NAM and Opt ATFCM – to represent and optimize the impact of the local airport planning processes at network level.

Modelling Techniques analyse air traffic operations based on a computer model that represents the displacement of traffic over time and/or processes involved. The models usually incorporate rule-based decisions that control the interactions between the simulated actors. EP3 WP3 used PROMAS, a process simulation tool that performs the role of the components of a complex system and reproduces the activities involved in it. Focus was on the feasibility of the CDM processes but also some performance values were provided.

Analytical Modelling Techniques concentrate on a macroscopic scale, using formulas and a high-level description of components, e.g. traffic flow instead of flight-by-flight basis. EP3 WP3 used ATM NEMMO, a dynamic model of the ECAC ATM system based on complex network theory.

The following table summarise all the EP3 WP3 validation activities.

ATM Phase Concept Validation

Technique Main

Objective Tools Summary of the exercises

Network Expert Group

Concept Detailing

Facilitation Techniques Annex I

Gaming Human-In-The-Loop

CDM Processes Feasibility

DARTIS Annex V

Modelling CDM

Processes Feasibility

PROMAS Annex V

Business Trajectory

Management and Dynamic

DCB

Analytical Modelling

Quantification of Network

Performance ATM NEMMO Annex VIII

Short and medium-

term planning

Airspace Organization &

Network Expert Group

Concept Detailing

Facilitation Techniques Annex I

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ATM Phase Concept Validation

Technique Main

Objective Tools Summary of the exercises

Management Gaming Human-In-The-Loop


Paper-Based + CHILL Annex VI

Airport Expert Group

Concept Detailing

Facilitation Techniques + CAST model

Annex IV

Airport Data Exchange

Expert Group

Concept Detailing

Facilitation Techniques Annex III

Collaborative Airport

Planning

Gaming Human-In-The-Loop


ACCES + NAM and Opt ATFCM

models Annex VII

Long-term planning (limited scope)

All In-House Experts mainly

Concept Detailing

Facilitation Techniques Annex II

Table 1: Summary of EP3 WP3 Validation Activities

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4 RESULTS ON CONCEPT VALIDATION This section is structured according to the three main areas of research that reconcile SESAR validation priorities and stakeholder alternatives:

• The management of arrival traffic congestion in the short-term planning and execution phases;

• The Advance Flexible Use of Airspace when military users request a new airspace reservation;

• The agreement of collaborative solutions through the future Airport Operations Centre.

4.1 SHORT TERM PLANNING AND EXECUTION PHASE . BUSINESS TRAJECTORY MANAGEMENT AND DYNAMIC DCB

4.1.1 Context The present section introduces the results obtained in this area – Business Trajectory management and Dynamic DCB – through the following validation techniques: Network Expert Group, Gaming Human-In-The Loop, CDM Processes Modelling and Analytical Modelling – Macromodel – for Network Performances.

The exercises addressed the collaborative processes to dynamically adjust the demand to the available capacity in the short-term planning and execution phases. In particular, the focus is on the management of arriving traffic congestion situations at large or medium size airports by means of DCB measures decided and applied at short notice. The Dynamic DCB process extends the geographical and temporal scope for the management of these inbound traffic congestion situations in the execution phase. The planning time horizon is from 30/40 minutes to a few hours in reference to the congested point.

Airspace Users manage their business trajectories during the short-term planning and the execution phase. They re-plan SBTs or/and re-negotiate RBTs according to their business needs, while taking into account Dynamic DCB constraints. SESAR business trajectory management is partially covered as it is limited to the collaborative management of time-based measures issued by these DCB processes.

4.1.2 Roles & Responsibilities The extension of the geographical range of an arrival queuing process will fundamentally shift the nature of the process from a local to a network scale. This raises many issues related to the share of responsibilities between regional, sub-regional and local actors related to the definition and implementation of the dynamic DCB solutions.

This issue was overcome by defining two ATM processes with different look-ahead time. On the one hand, a continuous AMAN process works mainly on airborne flights by managing accurate arrival sequences. This is done by issuing Controlled Time of Arrivals – CTAs –. On the other hand, an upstream dynamic DCB process pre-sequences flights when a significant imbalance is detected. This is done through the dynamic allocation of Target Time of Arrivals – TTAs –, and the consequent adaptation of business trajectories by airspace users.

The gaming participants considered that this breakdown allows the definition of a clear boundary between network and local/tactical processes and the clarification of roles and responsibilities. The conclusions about roles and responsibilities are as follows:

• The AMAN sequence (even considering an increased horizon) is under the responsibility of the APOC/TMA manager. Network managers are not directly

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involved in this process. This makes necessary the definition of a specific role within the APOC of the constrained airport. He is in charge of managing the AMAN sequence up to 30/40 minutes ahead but, at the same time, he is monitoring the Dynamic DCB sequence from 30/40 minutes to several hours ahead. In case of detecting a DCB imbalance at short notice, he coordinates with the Sub-Regional Manager of the sub-region that has the congested airport to trigger the Dynamic DCB solution;

• The actor triggering and managing the dynamic DCB TTA allocation process should be the Sub-Regional Network Manager of the sub-region that has the congested airport. The decision to trigger the dynamic DCB solution must be coordinated with the APOC of the constrained airport and the Regional Network Manager;

• Airspace users are owners of their business trajectories and are in charge of re-planning the business trajectories to take into account the DCB time-based constraints. Only the flight crew is involved in the management of constraints issued by the AMAN process (CTAs). However, the management of time-based constraints issued by the dynamic DCB process (TTAs) would be primarily under the responsibility of the AOC. For flights in execution phase, the AOC must work in close cooperation with the flight crew.

4.1.3 Key Findings about concept detailing The following conclusions are mainly based on experts judgements expressed in the context of the expert groups and gaming sessions. Considering the low maturity of the simulation means, the limited number of expert group/gaming sessions as well as the limited panel of experts involved, the conclusions presented in this section should be taken cautiously. Further investigation is required before the conclusions can be truly accepted as valid.

The two ATM processes were viewed by the experts as constituent elements of the queue management concept mentioned in the ConOps. This breakdown allows the definition of a clear boundary between network and local/tactical processes and the clarification of roles and responsibilities. Furthermore, it allows the design of a seamless arrival management process covering both the short-term planning and execution phases, whilst allowing the type of measure/time constraint to be adapted to the level of the congestion and the accuracy of the traffic picture.

The interaction between Business Trajectory Management and Dynamic DCB was detailed to perform the gaming sessions. EP3 designed the procedures to allow the airspace users to decide how to absorb arrival delays through 4D business trajectory re-planning. Involved airspace users judged those procedures as globally acceptable.

However, some operational parameters need to be refined, in particular, the maximum response time allowed following the reception of a TTA. It was also identified that in case of a capacity shortfall anticipated at short notice, the AOC staff of the main airline operating at a congested airport would probably be overloaded and would only be able to focus on a limited number of flights (the most critical ones from a business point of view).

The ANSP experts expressed doubts about the feasibility of the business trajectory management procedures implemented in the gaming platform. Their opinion is that, in order to increase efficiency of the overall process and reduce risk of increased complexity in terminal airspace, business trajectories respecting TTAs should first be determined by ATM taking into account network constraints and then proposed to airspace users who could then make counter-proposals.

There was no consensus about the nature and scope of UDPP. However, a large majority of experts considered that UDPP should be limited to high severity or crisis situations. The airspace users judged that in most of the situations simulated in the gaming sessions

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(medium severity situations, limited imbalances and delays), the triggering of a global prioritisation process should provide limited benefits compared to individual CDM functions (slot-swaps for example).

All experts agreed that UDPP should be limited to short-term planning phase and should not involve flights in execution phase.

In addition, experts agreed that different actors could decide to trigger UDPP depending on the type of problem: either the regional or sub-regional network manager, the airport (APOC) or a set of airlines.

Figure 2 provides an overview of the process as proposed in the gaming experiment.

UDPPUDPPDCB pre-sequence calculation

RBT/SBTs revisionSlot swap requests (AOC)

Network impact assessment

Time based measures to control the impact on upstream airspaces

Capacity shortfall/recoveryShort notice imbalance

Severesituation

Need for anticipateddynamic DCB measures

Continuousmonitoringprocess

DCB pre-sequence calculation










Allocation of TTAs

Figure 2: Business Trajectory Management and interaction with Dynamic DCB

4.1.4 Supporting tools The need to define advanced tools in support of the network/traffic monitoring tasks and the collaborative management of business trajectories was clearly identified. Some high-level requirements for advanced functions were collected and partly prototyped. Even though the models implemented have a low level of maturity, they can provide an initial basis for further investigation and collection of operational requirements.

The airspace users will need tools to support their business trajectory planning . These tools should include advanced flight planning functions to manage several time constraints emitted by the DCB processes. In addition, they should allow the implementation of different delays management strategies depending on the priority of flight.

The regional network manager will need tools that support real-time network monitoring. These tools will include advanced what-if functions to assess the network impact of DCB measures and airspace users’ replies. In this context, Advanced Indicators should be included to monitor complexity and performance factors for both en-route and TMA. These supporting tools will be equipped with context-oriented alerts highlighting network changes and analysing accurately the impact of business trajectories modifications.

The sub-regional network manager will need tools to manage the dynamic DCB sequence including different strategies for mixing flights in planning and execution phase. These tools should have advanced operational parameters to adjust dynamically the dynamic DCB measures to the severity of the situation and the accuracy of the traffic and capacity prediction.

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4.1.5 Open issues and Maturity level As stated in the previous sections.

Related to those concept elements, maturity can be still evaluated at V1 phase (referring to E-OCVM).

4.1.6 Performance Assessment The participants in the gaming sessions considered that Efficiency - through an optimal management of delays when any exist - and Predictability should be positively impacted by the implementation of the two ATM processes with different look-ahead time.

Preliminary quantification of the performance benefits was obtained by means of an innovative analytical modelling technique. This macromodel built a framework to analyze macroscopic behaviour of multi-component systems with complex interactions. Due to the early maturity stage of the concept and the innovative character of the model, the conclusions must be taken cautiously at this stage.

The model provided Performance Indicators at ECAC level related to Key Performance Areas as Efficiency and Predictability. These indicators were selected from the EP3 WP2.4.1 Performance Framework [18] that used the SESAR D2 [6] as one of the main sources of information.

This macromodel reproduced DCB imbalances across the network in the short-term planning phase. Severe and/or non-severe capacity shortfalls triggered the Dynamic DCB measures. These shortfalls were mainly designed at congested airports, but high-complexity en-route areas were also taken into consideration.

The Dynamic DCB processes pre-sequence flights when the imbalances are detected. The fulfilment of Target Time of Arrivals – TTAs – and the subsequent reduction in the uncertainty of the flight duration should allow reducing capacity buffers. This should have a positive impact on the effective use of Capacity and consequently on the ECAC-Wide Efficiency and Predictability.

Most of the simulated scenarios showed improvements in the predefined Indicators. Special mention should be made of the reduction of the knock-on effect with focus in the impact of the lack of On-Time operations and schedule buffers on subsequent flights . Such impact takes the form of reactionary delays, and in more extreme cases may lead to flight cancellations. Reactionary delays may reduce by as much as 40% in the simulations.

On the other hand, results seem to indicate that although the flight duration uncertainty and reactionary delays are reduced, the number of delayed flights is similar and they suffer higher departure delays. These results could be an effect of the network saturation. In airports with dependant runways, there is a reduction in the availability of time windows for departures if all arrivals fulfil with their TTAs. Consequently, arrivals stay on ground until a slot is made available. In these situations, strategies for the allocation of TTAs should consider the impact on departures.

It is worth highlighting that the modelling of this Operational Improvement relies on the simplifying assumption of eliminating the uncertainty of flight duration. Even in the future Trajectory Based Operations environment, some uncertainty associated to the 4D trajectory will continue to be present in the system. The study of this uncertainty will be an active research area along the next few years, which should feed the refinement and enlargement of the analysis carried out in these preliminary experiments.

This macromodel was also used to reproduce the situation leading to the triggering of the UDPP process for departures in case of severe capacity shortfalls. The model studied the impact of different prioritisation criteria in network performances, capturing any adverse network wide effects. The participants in the Network Expert Group selected two different

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criteria: the prioritisation of departure flights with the highest number of connections, and the prioritization of departures with shorter flight distances.

The results showed that both criteria had a slight improvement in Efficiency, at the cost of a significant increase in the number of capacity overloads at certain airports. This was particularly observed when applying the criteria of prioritising the flights with the highest number of connections. Those airports that are more connected are more susceptible of suffering throughput overloads. If the flights going to the more important airports have priority, the rest of the network is degraded very quickly and soon the full network is affected.

Sensitivity of the network behaviour should be further analysed before confirming this conclusion with other microscopic tools. With this tool, flights connections are only modelled in terms of mayor flows and not at the level of each single flight.

Another interesting conclusion was the independency of the two effects – Dynamic DCB and UDPP processes –. The two operational Improvements are not reinforced by the presence of the other. The simulated improvements are quite independent – one affecting departure prioritisation and the other one affecting the uncertainty of the flight duration –, so the crossed influence is small.

4.2 MEDIUM & SHORT TERM PLANNING . AIRSPACE ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT

4.2.1 Context The present section introduces the results obtained in this area – Airspace Organization and Management - by the different validation techniques: Network Expert Groups and gaming Human-In-The Loop Techniques.

The exercises address the Advanced Flexible Use of Airspace concept (AFUA concept). The gaming sessions were focused on the location and refinement of ad-hoc structure delineation at short notice to respond to short-term military users' requirements not covered by pre-defined structures and/or scenarios. EP3 aim was to gain insight into the actors’ interactions and required information to support decision-making processes. The dimension and location of this area was performed in a collaborative way between the different actors from the day before the operation up to some hours before the activation of the area.

These short-term changes implied the civil users’ participation to adapt their trajectories to the new airspace requirements. The Airspace Management Cell (AMC) and the Sub-Regional Manager (SBR) assured the proper use of the airspace and the stability and efficiency of the ATM Network at FAB level.

4.2.2 Roles & Responsibilities It was discovered that, when flexibility in the military area is possible, the dimension and location of this airspace reservation is not only a process where the Exercise Director and the Airspace Management Cell & Sub-Regional Manager are the involved actors but also the Civil Users. The civilians are a key active part of the collaborative process conveying their preferred trajectories and airspace reservation dimensioning.

The need of a new function/role representing users´ interests was detected. This new function, named Airline Coordinator, ensures that an equitable solution is applied when a considerable number of civil users are affected by a sudden change in the military airspace reservation.

The Airline Coordinator works in close cooperation with the Sub-Regional Manager of the corresponding FAB. This function/role is always aware of the negotiation process and the

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users` preferences, but only intervenes if the problem cannot be solved through direct negotiation between the civil users and the Sub-Regional Manager. As a consequence, its active participation in the process is linked to the difficulties to get an agreement due to the considerable number of affected civil users.

Depending on the severity of the capacity shortfall, a DCB measure is selected in the Catalogue of DCB Solutions or elaborated with possible network impact assessment. In case of a severe capacity shortfall, this function/role facilitates the User Driven Prioritization Process (UDPP).

The Exercise Director triggers the negotiation process by communicating the military needs in terms of airspace requirements and time slots. The involvement of this role in the whole process is essential to find the best possible solution. The Exercise Director may add new flexibility to the military requirements. He takes part in the process not only by providing airspace requests but also by analyzing other alternatives in terms of reservation location and size.

4.2.3 Key Findings about concept development One of the main topics for discussion was if the civil users could be involved in the negotiation of the ad-hoc structure from the beginning of the process or not. The process was named as ‘sequential’ or ‘parallel’ depending on the phase of entry of the civil users involved in the process.

The ‘sequential’ is a step-by-step process where the AMC&SBR receive the military request with the related flexibility, and make a decision on the most promising airspace reservation locations by using supposed civil users` trajectories. Then, the AMC&SBR request the preferred users’ locations along with their real preferred trajectories among the reduced set of alternatives.

The ‘parallel’ involves civil users from the beginning of the process. Thus, the AMC&SBR request the preferred users’ locations along with their real preferred trajectories among all possible locations according to the military request and related flexibility.

‘Pros’ and ‘Cons’ were identified during the gaming sessions. The ‘ideal’ solution could consist in an intermediate solution between the ‘parallel’ and the ‘sequential’ process. The communication with the civil users is possible during the whole process, but the responsible for the final solution should be the AMC&SBR. If necessary, the airspace users’ preferences could be taken into consideration from the beginning to decide collaboratively the best locations. Essentially, the severity of the DCB imbalance and the number of affected users are key factors that will influence the negotiation process.

Subsequently, the AMC&SBR should analyse if there is an airspace configuration without DCB imbalance. If the imbalance cannot be solved, a Basic DCB/ASM Solution will be selected by the Sub-regional Manager from the Catalogue or it should be elaborated with the related network impact assessment. Negotiation processes between users will support the decision of who will be affected by the DCB solution.

The Airline Coordinator should always be aware of this negotiation process, but only intervenes if the problem cannot be solved through direct negotiation between the civil users and the AMC&SBR. UDPP is exceptionally triggered to prioritise flights if there is no suitable DCB solution.

4.2.4 Supporting tools Some high-level requirements for advanced functions have been collected in the expert groups and the gaming sessions. They can provide an initial basis for further investigation and collection of operational requirements.

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The Civil Users should be supported by tools to assess the preferred trajectories. They will work with the Operational Quality Indicator as a function of the users` business model. The selection of the preferred trajectories and the least penalising SBT distortions will be done by maximizing this indicator. The civil users – or the Airline Coordinator – will send this information to the AMC&SBR.

The Operational Quality Indicator is a combination of the Passenger Quality Indicator and the Operating Cost Indicator. The first indicator is a measure of the quality of service provided to the passenger directly related to airport delays, loss of connections and number of affected passengers. The second indicator takes on board factors associated to the company costs such as extra-flight time, extra fuel consumption, crew activity, aircraft capacity or flight priorities.

When the shared use of airspace is conflicting with capacity, the SBR&AMC shall inform the civil users and the Airline Coordinator about the global capacity restriction. The Airline Coordinator or the civil airspace users will be supported by tools to assign these restrictions in an equitable way. They decide who are allowed to fly their preferred trajectories and, for those who are not allowed due to the capacity restriction, how to change their preferred trajectories based on their own business model. They will work with Operational Quality Indicators together with Equity Indicators mainly based on historic data.

The Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell will be responsible for deciding the use of airspace between civil and military airspace users. Tools that provide the most suitable airspace configuration to meet predicted demand with the minimum distortions to the business/mission trajectories will support them.

They will take into consideration the Operational Quality Indicators and Equity Indicators, together with the Minimum number of affected trajectories and the Cost of solution Indicator. Cost of Solution Indicator will allow them to select the most appropriate airspace configuration in order to maintain performance level targets (essentially capacity and efficiency levels).

4.2.5 Open issues and Maturity level The concept has been detailed but the identification of the potential benefit mechanism has not been consolidated at this stage. The Airspace Users participating in the Network Expert Group assessed positively the ‘ideal’ process and they foresee improvements in terms of flexibility of the system to commit with their airspace needs. This qualitative assessment cannot be considered as conclusive. The investment on supporting tools due to the increase in the process complexity should be justified by further quantitative assessments of the benefits.

Therefore, additional validation exercises should test the operability and performance improvements of the ‘ideal’ process.

In a rough estimation, this concept is at an intermediate step between V1 and V2 of its Concept Validation Life Cycle.

4.3 MEDIUM & SHORT TERM PLANNING . COLLABORATIVE AIRPORT PLANNING

4.3.1 Context The present section introduces the results obtained in this area – Collaborative Airport Planning - through the expert groups mainly. Due to the platform – ACCES- not being completely ready at the time of the experiment, the gaming exercise had a very explorative character. The experiment opened up the investigation of the collaborative decision process at the airport using gaming techniques and produced some initial findings of a more general nature.

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The SESAR Operational Concept states that airport operations during the medium/short term planning phase will be built upon the framework of Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) but with further enhancements to the decision making process.

SESAR proposes a concept whereby operational decisions, particularly those during periods of reduced capacity, taken by any given airport actor may be made in the full knowledge of the operational constraints and/or priorities of other actors who may be impacted by the decision. The management of degraded situations will therefore be improved, coupled with an earlier recovery to normal operations. This ‘future’ method of managing airport operations is referred to herein as Total Airport Management (TAM).

Episode 3 highlighted that the TAM concept should be based on three “pillars”:

• A collaborative Airport Operations Plan (AOP);

• An Airport Performance framework with specific performance targets;

• An Airport Operations Centre (APOC). Within the TAM concept, the APOC is seen as the platform which permits operators to communicate and co-ordinate, to develop and maintain dynamically joint plans and to execute those in their respective area of responsibility. The main information source shared between the actors in the APOC is therefore the AOP. The APOC should therefore be equipped with a real-time monitoring system, a decision support system and a set of collaborative procedures which will ensure a fully integrated management of landside & airside airport processes.

The focus of the work within Episode 3 has largely been on the definition of the high-level AOP content and particularly on the initial development of a fully integrated airside and landside monitoring system. Furthermore, key responsibilities of the airport stakeholders who will be involved in the APOC have been elaborated.

4.3.2 Roles & Responsibilities The APOC should be considered as an “agent-based” environment. These agents, effectively CDM representatives, will represent all the principal actors at an airport. Not all agents will need to be physically present in the APOC even on a part-time basis but it should be possible for these actors to be contacted with a minimum of delay using appropriate technology (internet based “chat” for example). The meteorological information service provider will typically fall into this category. Although not needing to be present in the APOC, the appropriate technological means will need to be considered to ensure that contact is possible to ensure all APOC agents have common and up-to-date weather information at their disposal.

Other agents will be physically present in the APOC. They will provide the interface between the APOC and the internal decision making bodies of their own organisation. For example, the CDM representative of an airline in the APOC will be the channel by which information will pass to and from the airline operations centre (AOC) and hub control centre (if appropriate). The means with which this communication should take place is an airline internal decision but key to the success of the APOC is the quality and efficiency of this information exchange.

The AOC Staff will be responsible for providing the interface between the collaborative decision making process within the APOC and their own organisation. The CDM agent should be able to communicate issues surrounding airport resource planning to their own internal “systems” and also communicate their own internal priorities into the global decision making environment that is the APOC.

Similarly, for ATC, an interface between the APOC and the TWR Controller (Tower Supervisor) is considered desirable. Again, the best compromise needs to be found between the CDM agent having a ready access to appropriate decision-making authorities

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whilst not affecting the smooth execution of operations within their representative organisation.

The Ground Handling Agent is responsible for providing a number of services to their contracted airlines during the aircraft turnaround period. They are heavily reliant on stable information concerning aircraft gate utilisation and expected arrival times. Similarly, the timely execution of their tasks in relation to a given aircraft is a key parameter in the determination of the aircraft “ready” time for its next rotation. Whilst it is unlikely that a permanent ground handling representation be required within the APOC, it is necessary that pertinent information (airline departure priorities including UDPP, aircraft arrival times, gate allocation, etc) available within the APOC will be disseminated to the appropriate ground handling authorities through the AOP.

The responsibility of the management of airside and landside resources and the necessity to ensure that this management is performed in a so far as possible fully collaborative environment means that the Airport Operator has a key role to play in the APOC.

The consistency of the AOP and the Network Operations Plan (NOP) will be ensured thanks to coordination between the Airport CDM Agents within the APOC and the Sub-Regional Network Manager Unit.

4.3.1 Key Findings about concept development The TAM philosophy is built upon airport CDM principles and therefore a large number of the processes defined within the A-CDM framework will continue to be employed. The introduction of the APOC reinforces considerably the collaborative element of the overall decision-making process. The various CDM processes will be supported notably by the AOP and much of the reflection of the Airport Expert Group was in the high-level definition of the AOP content. Episode 3 defined the following high-level ‘themes’ for the AOP content:

• Demand & Capacity Assessment. Assessment of demand and resource availability. Comprising flight plans, airport slots, special events, work in progress, strategic planning, airport configurations, capacities, airport infrastructure, equipment availability…

• Performance Trade-off Assessment. Priority setting between the selected performance areas (Safety, Capacity, Time-Efficiency, Predictability, Environmental Sustainability and Flexibility);

• Monitoring the AOP. Detection of deviations from planning and raising of alerts, supported by a common Traffic Situational Awareness (‘aircraft monitor’) and a Common Passenger Situational Awareness, provided by landside monitoring systems (‘passenger monitor’);

• Decision Making Support. Appropriate algorithms to assess potential impact of proposed changes to the AOP. This will be closely linked to the Performance Trade-off Assessment;

• Management. Implementation of existing A-CDM procedures, particularly the pre-departure sequence based on the Target Off block Time (TOBT). In addition, integration of new TAM procedures to improve TOBT accuracy and fully integrate landside and airside processes.

4.3.2 Supporting Tools The Airport Expert Group sessions identified a number of tools – or decision support aids –, which are of relevance to the concept. Typical interfaces for such tools as well as the underlying data requirements were discussed within the expert group. The different ‘services’

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which will be provided by TAM are the Performance Planning Service, the Monitoring and Alerting Service, the Decision Support Service and the Analysis Service.

The focus of the Episode 3 work was primarily on the monitoring and associated alerting service and a number of prototype user interfaces were assessed in this context. The definition of the monitoring service was focussed on two separate processes, namely the ‘aircraft process’ and the ‘passenger process’. The aircraft process covers the link between arriving and departing flights (primarily within the turn-round task although enriched with other data available through A-CDM) and the passenger process covers those ‘landside gates’ (security, customs etc) which the passenger is required to pass through. The timely integration of the two processes (which ideally occurs simultaneously at the commencement of boarding) is identified as being fundamental to the on-time departure of flights.

From the overall concept of landside / airside integration, these two processes need to be linked together. The following diagram, developed through the work of the expert group shows how the involved processes can be associated:

Figure 3: Integrated aircraft and passenger monitor

The key to monitoring the passenger process is knowledge of the time required from leaving the check in to arriving at the boarding gate (for non-transferring passengers) and the time required from de-boarding to the departure gate for transferring passengers. The relationship between this time and the TOBT is a strong indicator that a management decision on the part of the airline will be required.

A specific expert group involving airlines has also been devoted to the drafting of high level requirements regarding the development of a European portal of relevant information related to airports, that would provide a “quick-look” capability for an airline Operations Control Centre to rapidly access relevant information for airports of their choice. This would allow them taking operational decisions in a timely manner. If further information is required, then the operator should be directed to the local CDM site or to seek clarification from their local representatives as is the case today.

4.3.3 Open issues and Maturity level Episode 3 has constructed an overall framework by which the SESAR requirement to reinforce the CDM concept through a fully integrated airside and landside monitoring and control environment may be achieved. The elements of this framework will be further developed in a "staged" process within the SESAR Development Phase. However, the most fundamental element of the framework is the Airport Operational Plan (AOP) and Episode 3

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has identified the key high-level information elements which should form the content of the AOP.

4.4 LONG-TERM PLANNING The main objective was the definition of the operational details related to the ATM Collaborative Planning Processes for both the current and the future situation. The actors involved in every process along the Planning Phase, together with the availability and granularity of information in each of them, are some of the key topics.

The approach consisted mainly in establishing a relation with in-house experts to obtain their feedback about the current and future ATM processes. After extensive analysis of the current state-of-art, a limited number of expert group sessions were held to share and consolidate the findings.

4.4.1 Key Findings on the Concept development and Maturity Some processes can take advantage of airspace users `participation, not only to improve the planning by providing their forecasts, but also to find together the most suitable DCB solutions. As an example, long-term airport expansions are usually based on a political decision, but also on strategic decisions related to environmental constraints, community and business development plans or airport congestion. However, a feasible solution for the airspace users would be to reallocate capacity at nearby regional airports. Then, the coordination between airlines and airports at the long-term planning of the airport infrastructure development could be improved and, therefore, the expected needs could be better addressed.

SESAR recognizes that airports should be integral parts of ATM Network. There is a need for the refinement of current processes to better meet this objective. As an example, currently CFMU slot allocation is mainly focused on the airspace capacity without considering all airport constraints. In the SESAR context, airports should be better integrated into the overall capacity planning of the ATM systems, avoiding with this coordination future mismatches between airport and airspace capacity.

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5 RESULTS ON VALIDATION TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

5.1 INTRODUCTION EP3 WP3 has used expert groups, gaming exercises and innovative modelling techniques to clarify the SESAR ConOps in the planning phase, and to assess the feasibility of the CDM processes. This chapter analyses the applicability and gaps of each technique, together with the lessons learnt on the methodology to design and run the exercises.

5.2 EXPERT GROUPS In this section, the Expert-Group-Based validation technique is assessed. This assessment has a particular value, because it is worth of note that the two main groups – network and airport - have approached the task from two different points of view.

In more detail, while the Network Expert Group (EG) considered the most up-to-date representation of what should be the SESAR Concept of Operations, moving backwards (so to say) towards the current status, the Airport Collaborative Planning EG started from the current concept of operations and moved forward identifying gaps and improvements, which eventually could lead to a more SESAR-like concept of operations.

Remarkably, the conclusions of the two groups -which are given in the following section-, have been in practice the same.

5.2.1 Applicability and Gaps As any other validation process, the EG has advantages and drawbacks, which identify rather clearly the cases in which this technique can be applied, and the ones in which it should not be used.

More precisely, the EG technique is a very effective support to the preliminary steps of a top-down validation approach. By EG it is in fact possible to perform an initial assessment on operational process feasibility, detailing the concept in its early maturity stages by identifying alternatives, pointing out possible areas of concern or uncertainty and providing early clarifications about the foreseen roles and responsibilities.

Moreover, EG can give a qualitative identification of cross-effects between Operational Improvements and trade-offs between Key Performance Areas, and can be used as well to provide a qualitative performance assessment.

It is therefore possible to early identify potential process bottlenecks, providing evidence of different stakeholder’s views and business outcomes and disseminating early the validation results (so increasing the stakeholders buying-in in case the validation gives a positive outcome).

This last point is the only slight difference between the Airport and Network Expert Groups approach. The Airport moved-forward approach ensures high level of stakeholders buying-in, as the initial focus is on the current system and on how the SESAR ConOps could address today’s problems. On the other hand, the Network moved-backwards approach is more faithful with the SESAR ConOps, but the traceability between the current problems and the new concept is not visible at all.

On the other (drawback) side, the EG technique gives quite unreliable results when a quantitative performance assessment must be performed, mainly because it is normally based on a limited number of inputs, but also because it is difficult to set a common list of assumptions (and to understand their impact) related to the concept area being analysed.

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Last, but possibly the most important reason why EG are not suitable for quantitative assessments, is because -ultimately- no factual evidence can be provided to back up its results.

For what just said, it is difficult to think at the EG process as a stand-alone validation technique. However, once EG is part of a process combining other validation techniques like e.g. the Gaming one, and due to all the previous advantages, it can be considered as a useful validation enabler.

The Expert Groups could incorporate gaming sessions as good practice during their meetings at early stages of the concept maturity. In this context, gaming promotes original thinking facilitating the refinement, clarification and validation of the concept process feasibility.

The figure below represents the activities where EG will provide major benefits in combination with other human-in-the-loop (HIL) techniques e.g. Gaming.

Human-In-The-LoopGAMING

Results Consolidation Buy-In Dissemination

EXPERT GROUPS

Assumptions Consolidation Validation Scenarios Design

Participation during sessions Process refinement

Figure 4: Expert Group applicability

5.2.2 Practical recommendations on EG implementation The recommendations described in this section come from the lessons learnt during the activities of Airport and Network Expert Groups. Such guidelines should be followed when organising and managing an EG-based early validation to ensure its effectiveness.

First, all impacted stakeholders should participate in the Expert Group, including -when this is relevant- the different sub-categories within each major stakeholder (e.g. Airspace Users can include low cost airlines, commercial airlines, GA, Military etc.).

This being said, the EG should work in small teams focusing in different aspects of the concept and only at a second stage common conclusions should be drawn. The composition of these small teams should be periodically modified to ensure that all experts do contribute and all the opinions are considered.

Secondly, the EG should combine new concept to current operations expertise, mainly because experts in current operations tend to interpret the proposed validation exercises and questions based on their own day-to-day knowledge and is generally non-trivial for them to focus on future, more abstract, ideas.

Then, although EG is more useful at an early validation stage, it is recommended that EG should be involved in the different steps of each project life cycle as a support to other validation techniques.

On an even more practical level, it is recommendable to use a facilitator or facilitating techniques during the expert group discussions to guarantee that the meetings are dedicated to the designated objectives and all the issues are conveniently covered. The usual, general presentation followed by a collective discussion has been proven not to be effective to get as much experts’ feedback as possible.

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With this in mind, the EG sessions should be carefully prepared in advance, clearly identifying their scope and objectives and providing well in advance adequate material to the experts on the issues to be discussed.

Finally, it is important to dedicate enough time to identify and record the initial expectations of the experts at the beginning of each step in the validation exercises. The use of questionnaires as supporting material is recommendable since they guarantee the traceability of the feedback provided by the EG, the decisions taken during the meetings and agreements / disagreements and finally the link between the expert group and the Validation Exercises.

It is also useful to set-up a Web Forum for information exchange. Such forums work quite well to record opinions and valuable discussions can take place (although there is always some risk of noise).

5.3 GAMING HUMAN-I N-THE-LOOP TECHNIQUES The next step for the concept clarification was the assessment of the feasibility of the CDM processes. In this context, EP3 WP3 employed gaming techniques – three activities - to provide results on this context.

5.3.1 Applicability and gaps The Gaming technique is a very effective support to all concept definition stages. At early stages of concept maturity, gaming sessions can refine and clarify the roles and responsibilities, identifying the suitable steps in the process. As the concept gets more definition, this technique keeps refining details of roles and processes and identifying the showstoppers and bottlenecks and the appropriate solutions to fix them.

The assessment of processes feasibility (for instance CDM, UDPP processes) is the main objective of the gaming exercises. Actors are needed to represent all the roles involved in the analysed process (controllers, pilots, network managers, sub-regional managers, AOC, APOC, handling,…) in real time or even in slow time. In this context, as well as targeting the processes feasibility, these exercises can also help to identify potential functionalities of the tools to support the decisions of the actors. Both Paper-Based and Platform-Based methods are suitable for this propose at different levels of abstraction (paper-based method is more general and platform-based method offers results that are more specific).

All layered planning phases can be validated by means of this technique, not only the planning phases but also the execution phase. Time is the driver during the execution phase and therefore negotiation is usually more limited in scope. Gaming can capture crucial temporal aspects of the processes as negotiations duration, temporal transitions between processes or evolution of the system performances during the negotiations.

Gaming is not suitable to perform a global validation of the SESAR ConOps, but it is appropriate to explore key parts of the concept. The number of actors and variety of processes in a full-scale exercise are limiting factors. In addition, the scenario scale determines the gaming method: Paper-Based can easily support large-scale processes validation although these processes cannot be reproduced in detail. On the contrary, Platform-Based exercises can reproduce the processes with more realism, but in a limited scale.

Consequently, Paper-Based Gaming is more suitable for early Maturity Level V1, with a high number of options to be explored. When the number of alternatives is reduced, Platform- based gaming can be used to assess in detail the CDM processes and requirements for supporting tools.

Gaming can take advantage of a combined approach with other techniques, as Expert Groups or Modelling. The combination with Modelling and/or Fast-Time Simulations should allow the assessment of performances. The main constraint is the effort required to link both

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techniques. The straightforward outputs of the gaming exercises are not appropriate to feed directly to the performance assessment techniques. The gaming results must be treated in advance to extrapolate and obtain general patterns at different levels.

The figure below represents the activities where Gaming techniques will provide major benefits in combination with modelling techniques.

Paper-Based

GAMING

Platform-Based

GAMINGAnalitical Modelling

Fast-Time Simulations

EXPERT GROUPS

Gaming results extrapolation to obtain general patterns as inputs for

performance assessment

Feasibility of Processes

Performance Assessment

Detailed Concept Clarification

Figure 5: Gaming applicability

5.3.2 Practical recommendations on Gaming implementation The recommendations described in this section come from the lessons learnt during the activities of Dynamic DCB, Airspace Organization and Airport Planning Gaming sessions. Such guidelines should be followed when organising and managing a Gaming-based early validation to ensure its effectiveness.

Training of the actors/players on the gaming technique and tools is essential before starting the sessions. Even, it could be interesting that experts are involved in the preparation of scenarios of the exercises previously to the sessions running. This will ensure that actors have the right understanding of their predefined roles and responsibilities. In this context, the results of the game may inspire changes or additions to the predefined roles functions.

Common tendencies of the gaming participants are to reproduce current practices through different processes and procedures, and to focus on detailed system requirements (e.g., queuing algorithms, graphical representations) rather than on general concept refinement. Thus, the definition of the session scope and objectives need to be very precise. The roles should have a clear view of their mission, objectives and personal strategies during the session.

With this in mind, the Gaming sessions should be carefully prepared in advance. In case of addressing a part of the concept not mature enough, the first gaming sessions should let participants to act freely in order to obtain a preliminary description of the concept. Once the concept is more detailed, the scenario should be prepared (or with the Game Master intervention) to lead the game towards the main topics to be refined.

The outcomes of every process should be iterative. The conclusions from a particular process should be used to design the subsequent process. In this way, the advantages and disadvantages founded in every gaming session are refined in the next session.

Due to room limitations, it is not possible to play with all actors involved in a real operational scenario. In the case of civil users, the participants should represent not only a particular company but also civil user’s collectives such as commercial aviation, low cost, business or general aviation. In this context, different points of view could be explored by repeating identical games with the same participants in diverse roles.

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The use of questionnaires will assess the confidence on the results - and the gaming technique in general - at the starting and at the end of the gaming sessions. This information is essential, as gaming exercises are not providing quantitative results.

Recording the communications between actors is strongly recommended. This information should be analysed with the experts after the sessions. The purpose is to study how the process evolves, to detect the optimal sequence of steps and to identify the information interchanged.

5.4 MODELLING TECHNIQUES FOR CDM PROCESSES

5.4.1 Applicability and gaps Processes modelling have proven to be a new gaming-compatible technique able to assess complex ATM systems in an automated way by means of fast-time process simulations. It is particularly focused on the study of non-consistencies, processes bottlenecks, useful procedures, information flows, actions triggered by modifications of parameters and roles and responsibilities of the actors involved.

The scenarios can model a high number of actors, a whole traffic sample, different strategies and role behaviours, being the user able to modify and combine any of the implemented variables to perform sensitivity analysis. Models are scalable as the initial scope could be gradually increased together with the maturity of the concept assessed.

This technique enables both a performance analysis, through the generation of quantitative results, and an operability assessment in support of concept clarification. The objectivity of the results is guaranteed since the simulation model is absolutely automated.

On the contrary, this technique has some limitations imposed either by the complexity of the software or by the definition of the technique itself. Focusing on the last one, process modelling requires a very detailed description of the processes implemented, given the importance and potential impact of assumptions.

Consequently, results were not covering the initial high expectations due to the use of the technique to assess a low maturity concept: as detailed processes were not yet precisely defined, the software could not include mature models.

5.4.1 Practical recommendations on CDM Processes model implementation

It is recommended to use this technique once the concept is described in sufficient detail, although some aspects of the concept could be unknown or unclear. CDM process modelling will support the concept refinement by analysing the processes bottlenecks, information flows and procedures in a wider context for normal and non-normal conditions. Thus, the applicability of this technique is more on Maturity Level V2.

It is also important to highlight that experts involved in the modelling task require a significant training period to gain a common understanding of the assessed concept elements.

Finally, although objectivity is ensured because the simulation is fully automated, some of the findings may be very dependent on the models and assumptions implemented in the software.

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5.5 ANALYTICAL (MACRO) MODELLING FOR NETWORK PERFORMANCES

5.5.1 Applicability and gaps Macromodelling is suitable to characterize the macroscopic behaviour of the systems or networks, and concretely in EP3, the ATM Network behaviour at ECAC level. This modelling allows analysing how the SESAR Operational Improvements may affect the global ECAC performances, extending or refining the conclusions obtained in local exercises. In addition, macromodelling enables the identification of ECAC knock-on effects in terms of their influences on ECAC performance indicators.

This is a cost-effective technique to characterize multiple scenarios with different traffic behaviour, local rules or uncertainty in the planning. Therefore, macromodelling is suitable for concepts which are not mature enough, and with many number of options to be assessed.

Macromodelling concentrates on a macroscopic scale by nature, using formulas and a high-level description of components (e.g. traffic flow instead of flight-by-flight basis). The technique complies with the objective of providing quantitative results at a macroscopic level, but it does not intend to model in detail the traffic dynamics. This technique allows to easily implementing new aspects of the concept without the need of modelling at microscopic level that would require fine-grained modelling of the traffic processes and therefore concept details that are not available at these stages of the validation lifecycle.

On the contrary, analytical models are less appropriate than the microscopic ones for evaluation of systems at the operational level since the representation of many dynamic traffic management systems requires fine-grained modelling of the traffic processes, usually at local level.

5.5.2 Practical recommendations on analytical macromodel implementation

For immature concepts, there is no easy way to assess the realism/correctness of the models and thus to ensure credibility of the results. Thus, it is recommended a continuous experts’ participation. They should support the definition of the simulation scenarios, and the identification of hypothesis, as a critical issue to ensure the confidence on the results. Experts should be aware of the implemented basic rules and the characterization of the concept in the model.

On the other hand, explanation of the results requires a high degree of detail and analysis to make them understandable for the Experts. So, the Indicators obtained should be explained in detail together with reasoning for the improvement with respect to the baseline scenario.

There is a necessity of quantitative data to design the exercises for analytical modelling. Initial data are needed to execute the simulations. This issue could be one of the main inconvenient to extend the results from the local exercises at global level.

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6 CONCLUSIONS

6.1 CONCEPT CLARIFICATION The principle of business management ownership and its interpretation in the context of DCB processes is an open issue with diverging opinions. The Civil Users claim their active participation by taking decisions on trajectory changes from the beginning of the DCB processes. Meanwhile the network managers expose that business trajectories should first be determined by ATM taking into account network constraints, and then proposed to airspace users who could make counter-proposals. This should increase efficiency of the overall process and reduce risk of increased complexity when an imbalance is detected.

In order to solve these apparent confronted opinions, EP3 has defined a new function/role that could convey the civil users interests integrated within the decision-making cores: The Airline Coordinator. This function will ensure the equity of the priorised users, especially in case of DCB measures affecting a considerable number of airspace users. The Airline Coordinator should always be aware of the negotiation process, but only intervenes if the problem cannot be solved through direct negotiation between the airspace users and the Sub-regional network manager.

This function could have an active participation not only at sub-regional level, but also at the airport context. CDM representatives of the airlines in the APOC are identified as the channels by which information will pass to and from the airline operations centres (AOCs). Key to the success of the APOC is the quality and efficiency of this information exchange, especially in the management of degraded situations. In this context, the Airline Coordinator could ensure the users’ equity in the APOC, and improve efficiency in the decision-making processes to couple with earlier recoveries to normal conditions.

In order to support the collaborative processes and ensure their feasibility, advanced tools/applications become essential to sustain not only the processes but also the different actors’ tasks. Automation is the answer to guarantee the equitable treatment of airspace users, and the consideration of their interests whilst maintaining of the performance levels targets.

The highly iterative negotiation processes make essential the capability of these supporting tools to manage different DCB solutions at the same time, together with the associated airspace users’ trajectories per each solution. This information will be published and shared through SWIM during the negotiation process in order to guarantee transparency of the shared data and to provide a common basis for the negotiation. Thus, NOP and AOP will only be updated when the consolidated agreement is reached.

In addition, these advanced tools should be equipped with customizable alarms that alert about changes affecting the progress of the negotiation e.g. new information sharing, changes in the NOP..., and the evolution of predefined performance indicators.

The extension of geographical ranges and temporal scopes will fundamentally shift the nature of the planning processes in the future. This raises many issues related to the share of responsibilities between regional, sub-regional and local actors related to the definition and implementation of DCB measures. A clear breakdown of the ATM planning processes according to the temporal scope, look-ahead time horizon and actors involved is essential to define a logical boundary between network, local and tactical processes. This will also facilitate the identification of actors’ responsibilities, and the collection of high-level requirements for advanced functions of the supporting tools.

As an example, the breakdown in two different ATM processes – a continuous AMAN, and a dynamic DCB pre-sequencing flights – was positively assessed in the short-term planning phase. These two processes were considered as constituent elements of the Queue Management Concept mentioned in the SESAR ConOps.

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Although the explored concept elements evolved towards more level of detail, essential open issues with diverging opinions need to be further investigated such as the previous issue about business management ownership. Consequently, these concept elements can still be evaluated at V1 of its Concept Validation Life Cycle (referring to E-OCVM).

6.2 INNOVATIVE VALIDATION TECHNIQUES In order to analyse the process feasibility aspects during the planning phase, innovative validation techniques that emulate the collaborative decision making processes have been applied. These techniques can be classified in those with human-in-the-loop participation (gaming techniques) and those where the processes are modelled incorporating rule-based decisions that control the interactions between the actors being simulated (process-modelling techniques).

The use of these techniques are closely dependant on the concept maturity analysed. In this way, the gaming techniques have been exploited using two different means: using just cards (paper-based) and using a dedicated software platform (platform-based). Paper-based has proved to be a cheap effective mean for definition and clarification of concepts and processes and to lay foundations for further investigations in platform-based sessions. Platform-based sessions were found to be illustrations of 2020 concept providing more realism on environment, process and actors’ performances.

The process modelling techniques are particularly useful at revealing hidden incoherencies arising from the relations between actors involved and their responsibilities not detected with gaming. These techniques will use the details coming from the gaming sessions.

In order to analyse the performance assessment during the planning phase, the uncertainty of the demand is essential to be considered in validation. Macroanalytical models are cost-effective techniques to characterize multiple scenarios with different traffic behaviour, local rules or uncertainty in the planning. Therefore, macromodelling is suitable for concepts, which are not mature enough, and with many number of options to be assessed.

By considering a further lifecycle validation step and trying to bridge the limited ability of macroanalytical modelling to capture detailed behaviours, the performance validation process should ideally be completed with micromodelling at local levels using fast time simulations techniques. Fast-time simulations have not been applied in EP3 WP3 with this purpose but would suppose a relevant input to refine the assessment at ECAC wide level.

The following picture would present a proposed combination of techniques for process feasibility and performance assessment depending on the exercise scale and the lifecycle concept maturity. The Expert Judgement should always be present in all the validation processes in order to ensure the assumptions consolidation, validation scenarios design, results consolidation and dissemination, and stakeholders buy-in.

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EXPERT GROUP

MACROMODEL

LOCAL ASSESSMENT

ECAC WIDE ASSESSMENT

MICROMODEL(FTS)

MACROMODEL

CONCEPT MATURITY

PAPER-BASEDGAMING

LOCAL PROCESS FEASIBILITY

PLATFORM-BASED GAMING

PROCESS MODELLINGGLOBAL PROCESS FEASIBILITY

Figure 6: Collaborative Planning Validation Tools

When the concept is not mature enough, several processes alternatives may be feasible to achieve the same goal. The evolution of the affected ATM performances could support the decision on which is the most suitable process. Currently methodologies and tools to assess the processes impact on performances is missing. A future connection between these two validation technique groups may support the benchmarking related to the selection of the process.

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7 RECOMMENDATIONS Chapter 4 and 5 of the present document provide not only key findings on the concept, but also detailed lessons learnt and recommendations to the feasibility of the planning processes and to the correct use of innovative validation techniques. This chapter summarizes the most significant ones:

• EP3 WP3 recommends further exploring some essential open issues with diverging opinions. One of the future priorities should be to clarify the principle of business management ownership and its interpretation in the context of DCB processes. The Civil Users claim their active participation in those DCB processes where the decisions affect their business trajectories.

• The Airline Coordinator’ tasks should be further detailed. This will allow identifying if the Airline Coordinator should be an advanced ATM function, or on the contrary, a new human role should be defined to ensure equity between airspace users and efficiency in the decision-making processes.

• The investment on advanced supporting tools due to the increase in the processes complexity should be clearly justified. EP3 WP3 recommends further quantitative assessments of the performance benefits. Then, a CBA analysis should consider this performance impact as an input along with other parameters such as the actors’ involvement and automation investment.

• It is recommended to go deeply in the detailed breakdown of the ATM planning processes according to the temporal range, look-ahead time horizon and actors involved. Special attention should be paid on the interactions between processes at sub-regional, regional and airport level to clearly identify the actors’ responsibilities and scope of each process.

• With respect to the applied innovative validation techniques, Expert Group-Based has proved to be an effective support to the preliminary steps of a top-down validation approach. On the other side, it is difficult to think at the EG as a stand-alone validation technique. EP3 WP3 recommends incorporating gaming sessions as good practice during their meetings at early stages of the concept maturity.

• Although gaming technique is an effective support to all concept definition stages, Paper-based sessions are recommended for early maturity level V1, with a high number of options to be explored. Then, Platform-based sessions are recommended to provide more realism on environment, processes and actors’ performances. Finally, the processes-modelling technique should be used once the concept is described in sufficient detail, although some aspects of the concept are unknown or unclear. Thus, the applicability of this innovative technique is more on Maturity Level V2.

• EP3 WP3 recommends the involvement of experts in all steps of the project lifecycle. It is therefore possible to disseminate early the validation results (so increasing the stakeholders buying-in in case the validation gives a positive outcome).

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8 REFERENCES AND APPLICABLE DOCUMENTS [1] Episode 3 Contract Annex 1, DoW Revision 3.1, 10.07.2009

[2] European Operational Concept Validation Methodology E-OCVM - V2.0, 17.03.2007

[3] SESAR Identification of limits/blocking points for airspace environment, DLT-0507-321-00-96_T321_D1

[4] SESAR Concept of Operations - DLT-0612-222-00

[5] SESAR D1 Air Transport Framework: The Current Situation, DLM -0602-001-03-00, 01.07.2006

[6] SESAR D2 Air Transport Framework: The Performance Target, DLM-0607-001-02-00, 30.11.2006

[7] SESAR D3 The ATM Target Concept, DLM-0612-001-02-00a, 04.09.2007

[8] SESAR D4 The ATM Deployment Sequence. DLM-0706-001-02-00, 29.01.2008

[9] SESAR D5 SESAR Master Plan, DLM-0710-001-02-00, 01.04.2008

[10] SESAR D6 Work Programme for 2008 -2013, DLM-0710-002-00, 01.04.2008

[11] Episode 3 WP3 Contribution to the EP3 Validation Strategy. D3.2.1-01, V1.0, 21.10.2008.

[12] Episode 3 SESAR DOD G - General Detailed Operational Description - D2.2-040

[13] Episode 3 SESAR DOD M2 - Medium/Short Term Network Planning Detailed Operational Description - D2.2-043

[14] Episode 3 SESAR DOD M1 - Collaborative Airport Planning Detailed Operational Description - D2.2-042

[15] Episode 3 OS-11 Non-Severe Capacity Shortfall Impacting Arrivals in the Short-Term Operational Scenario - part of Annex to SESAR DOD G - Operational Scenarios - D2.2-050

[16] Episode 3 OS-34 Military Collaboration in the Medium/Short-Term Operational Scenario - part of Annex to SESAR DOD G - Operational Scenarios - D2.2-050

[17] Episode 3 EP3 Consolidated Validation Strategy - D2.0-01

[18] Episode 3 Catalogue of Performance indicators and traceability operational improvement step vs ECAC performance indicators - D2.4.1-04b

[19] SESAR SESAR Task Deliverable: DLT-0706-31-00-10_T31X_Integration of European ATM Initiatives & Programmes

[20] CAATS II The Co-operative Approach to Air Traffic Services II (CAATS-II) Project

[21] Episode 3 SESAR DOD E4 - Network Management in the Execution Phase Detailed Operational Description - D2.2-046

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9 ANNEX I - SUMMARY OF THE COLLABORATIVE NETWORK PLANNING EXPERT GROUP REPORT (D3.3.1-02)

WP3.3.1 Collaborative Network Expert Group WP Leader Aena

Purpose

The main objectives of EP3 WP3.3.1 are:

• To obtain the operational details related to the ATM Collaborative Planning available information along the phases coming from the different civil and military actors – e.g. users, airports, service providers – granularity of the information, the actors involved in every phase of the planning, the main milestones that could change the plan;

• To refine the operational scenarios and the relevant DODs;

• To provide feedback on the technical approach and the validation scenarios to be simulated in other EP3 WP3 activities;

• To analyse the consistency of the validation results in other EP3 WP3 activities;

• To provide feedback on Expert Group as a validation technique.

In particular, this Collaborative Network Expert Group is focused on the activities related to medium and short-term planning process, addressing specifically the end of the medium term, i.e. 1 day before the day of operation, and the short-term, i.e. some hours before the operation.

SESAR ASPECTS

The SESAR Operational Concept related to the SESAR Collaborative Layered Planning Process and refined during EP3 WP3.3.1 Network Expert Group activities is “medium and short-term network planning”. This expert group addresses the notion of ‘Collaborative Planning’, but focusing on the Network operational context.

DOD M2 – Medium-Short Term Network Planning document describes the Collaborative Network Planning concept.

Hypothesis N/A

Main measures

• Support to refinement of the current DODs;

• Operational details related to the Collaborative Planning at Network Level (Planning Phases and available information, granularity of the information, actors, roles and responsibilities involved in every phase of the planning);

• Refinement of the Operational Scenarios related to EP3 WP3.3.2, EP3 WP3.3.3 and EP3 WP3.3.5 validation exercises;

• Refinement of the experimental approach and validation scenarios to be simulated;

• Analysis of the consistency of the validation results;

• Feedback on Expert Group as a validation technique.

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Validation Objectives The objectives of Episode 3 WP3.3.1 are:

• To obtain the operational details related to the ATM Collaborative Planning: available information along the phases coming from the different civil and military actors – e.g. users, airports, service providers – granularity of the information, the actors involved in every phase of the planning, the main milestones that could change the plan;

• To refine the operational scenarios and the relevant DODs;

• To provide feedback on the technical approach and the validation scenarios to be simulated in other EP3 WP3 activities;

• To analyse the consistency of the validation results in other EP3 WP3 activities;

• To provide feedback on Expert Group as a validation technique.

In particular, this Collaborative Network Expert Group is focussed on the activities related to medium and short-term planning process, addressing specifically the end of the medium term i.e. 1 day before the day of operation and the short term i.e. some hours before the operation.

ATM Concept Being Addressed The SESAR Operational Concept related to the SESAR Collaborative Layered Planning Process and refined during EP3 WP3.3.1 Network Expert Group activities is “medium and short-term network planning”. This expert group addresses the notion of ‘Collaborative Planning’, but focusing on the Network operational context, which is described in the DOD M2 Medium-Short Term Network Planning document [13].

A synopsis of medium/short-term network planning is summarised as follows:

• Airspace Users declare their flight intentions and optimise their trajectory through SBTs, in accordance with their business model. Military users declare their airspace requirements. The NOP is visible to all of them at all times;

• The airspace is organised so as to respect their preferences and provide enough capacity, taking into account airspace requirements;

• The planned traffic and airspace demand and the planned capacity are evaluated by the Network Management function, so as to detect potential imbalances;

• In case of imbalance, a DCB Solution is selected in the Catalogue or elaborated with possible network impact assessment;

• The solution is then applied, resulting in capacity adjustments and possibly demand adjustments if advisories are notified or constraints are necessary. Airspace reservations are also optimised accordingly, if possible. UDPP is exceptionally triggered to prioritise flights;

• The foreseen ATM picture is reassessed after implementation of the DCB Solution;

• The DCB loop runs iteratively during the medium and short-term planning phases so that demand and capacity are balanced when SBTs become stable: the execution of RBTs can start, being served by the optimal Capacity Plan and the optimal Airspace Use Plan.

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Validation Technique: Expert Group EP3 WP3.3.1 Collaborative Network Experts Group provided feedback and support to three EP3 WP3 validation exercises:

• EP3 WP3.3.2 analyses the collaborative processes to adjust the demand to the available capacity in the short-term planning and execution phases;

• EP3 WP3.3.3 is focused on Airspace Organization and Management;

• EP3 WP3.3.5 deals with Global Performance at Network Wide Level.

The figure below depicts the relationships between the EP3 WP3.3.1 Collaborative Network Expert Group and EP3 WP3.3.X validation exercises as well as the different steps of the work done:

Figure 7: Sequence of validation activities in EP3 WP3

Collection and compilation of information from the experts has been driven by the use of questionnaires and by regular meetings. The questionnaires were specifically designed to support the EP3 WP3.3.2, EP3 WP3.3.3 and EP3 WP3.3.5 validation exercises. The results were analysed and presented to the group and EP3 WP3.3 validation exercise leaders during the meetings. These public discussions facilitated the consolidation of the information.

This work package has consisted of a continuous task along the project. EP3 WP3 validation activities received support by EP3 WP3.3.1 Network Expert Group during the whole exercises’ life-cycle, from the definition of the operational details of the ATM planning process and the correspondent experimental plans to the final consolidation and analysis of their validation results.

To gain greater understanding of the concept, Network Expert Group in EP3 WP3 has clarified the SESAR concept elements related to the Planning Process supported by analytical modelling, gaming and exercises. These descriptions were captured in the associated Detailed Operational Documents that consolidated operational scenarios and use cases used in assessment activity, linked to the SESAR Concept documents. Figure 2 illustrates these flows of information.

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Preparation of exercise

Specific questions related to hypothesis and assumptions

Further Details related to identified Operational scenarios

Expert Group meetings

Refinement of Operational Scenarios

Consolidation of answers from the experts

Running the exerciseConsolidation of performance & Operational results

Refinement of Operational scenarios and, if needed, use cases

Integration of EP3 results Process Model and DODs

WP3.3 Exercises

WP3.2.2 Concept Refinement

WP3.3.1 EGs

WP2.5 Reporting & Dissemination

WP2.2 Clarification & Refinement of SESAR

CONOPS

WP3.3 Exercises

WP3.3 Exercises WP3.3 Exercises

WP3.3.1 EGs

WP3.2.2 Concept RefinementWP3.3 Exercises

WP2.41 Performance Framework

WP2.3 Validation Process

Management

Preparation of exercise

Specific questions related to hypothesis and assumptions

Further Details related to identified Operational scenarios

Expert Group meetings

Refinement of Operational Scenarios

Consolidation of answers from the experts

Running the exerciseConsolidation of performance & Operational results

Refinement of Operational scenarios and, if needed, use cases

Integration of EP3 results Process Model and DODs

WP3.3 Exercises

WP3.2.2 Concept Refinement

WP3.3.1 EGs

WP2.5 Reporting & Dissemination

WP2.2 Clarification & Refinement of SESAR

CONOPS

WP3.3 Exercises

WP3.3 Exercises WP3.3 Exercises

WP3.3.1 EGs

WP3.2.2 Concept RefinementWP3.3 Exercises

WP2.41 Performance Framework

WP2.3 Validation Process

Management

Figure 8: EP3 WP3.3.1 Relations with EP3 WP3 Validation Exercises

Results Next the main results obtained from the expert group are summarized:

1. Operational Details related to the ATM Concept being addressed The following DODs have been addressed by this Expert Group:

• M2 Medium/Short Term Network Planning [13] (EP3 WP3.3.2 and WP3.3.3 exercises);

• E4 Network Management in the Execution Phase [21] (EP3 WP3.3.2 exercise).

EP3.WP3.3.1 Network Expert Group activities provided feedback to the following operational scenarios:

Operational Scenario Validation Exercise

OS-11 Non-severe (no UDPP) capacity shortfall impacting arrivals in the short term EP3 WP3.3.2

OS-34 Military collaboration in the medium and short term EP3 WP3.3.3

Table 2: List of Operational Scenarios

OS-11 Non-Severe (no UDPP) Capacity Shortfall Impacting Arrivals in the Short-Term

The main conclusions related to this Operational Scenario can be grouped into three classes:

• Concept definition, for example UDPP;

• Technical questions dealing for example with getting into details with the dynamic DCB process;

• Parameterisation like the assumption on ATM level 3 capability.

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Concept Definition

Defining Demand/Capacity Balancing:

The differences between the two following processes of the ATM process model, 2.3.2 “Propose a DCB solution” and 3.1.3 “Propose a Dynamic DCB solution”, needed clarification, in particular the conditions and the time of activation of each of these processes, as well as the frontier between the short term processes and the execution process.

Experts provide the following stand points:

• A DCB measure applies up to the initial RBT while a dynamic DCB measure applies to the actual RBT;

• Process “Propose a DCB solution” can be applied 2 hours before the constraint while “Propose a Dynamic DCB solution” can be applied from 2 hours to 40 minutes before the constraint;

• A dynamic DCB solution is implemented for a short time execution, for instance with half an hour to 4 hours time horizon; it is an additional constraint or lightening to the DCB plan. Therefore, it is a temporary change of a constraint described in the DCB plan.

Most of the Experts agree that a DCB solution is defined / applied from several hours to 60 minutes in advance during the planning phase while a dynamic DCB solution applies between 2 hours and 40 minutes during the execution phase.

Both processes must be seen as continuous processes even if the planning phase ends with the publication of the RBT the user agrees to fly and the ANSP and Airports agree to facilitate.

In addition, the Expert Group stated the following points:

• Concerning roles and responsibilities:

o It is the role of the regional / sub-regional / network manager or Civil-military airspace manager or AOC/APOC staff to propose a dynamic DCB solution;

o To assess network impact of a dynamic DCB solution is dedicated to the regional network manager;

o “Apply the DCB solution” is the role of the sub-regional network manager, or the APOC staff by “sending a GO for implementation concerning solutions that have been activated in the NOP”.

• Concerning TTA update:

o The System will (re)-calculate all the concerned TTAs in case of a DCB solution is implemented;

o It will be the role of the AOCs to propose a different TTA depending on their operational requirements;

o In this case, the System will validate the corresponding SBT/RBTs including the TTA.

Technical questions - parameterisation

• DCB Queue Management and AMAN:

Regarding the DCB Queue Management active time horizon, the expert stated that the limit for starting sending a TTA could be defined by a fixed time parameter before the ETA or else. The DCB active time horizon should be a fixed time

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parameter. Nevertheless, delay monitoring should be possible before the DCB active time horizon.

Concerning the Boundaries between Dynamic DCB and AMAN the experts agreed that between 40 to 50 minutes seems to be reasonable.

In addition, the experts were asked whether the AMAN and dynamic DCB Processes can be managed by a unique system i.e. Extended AMAN or by two distinct systems.

All the Experts agreed to have both functionalities i.e. arrival management and dynamic DCB considering two separated tools i.e. an AMAN and dynamic DCB since:

o Not all flights are subject to DCB and/or AMAN estimates;

o Capacity problems are along the entire route and the AMAN is focused on the last part of the arrival.

• TTA Management:

The first question related to the TTAs asked about on which point of the 4D trajectory the DCB constraints should be applied regarding the TTA: the IAF or the FAF or at the transition between the DCB queue and the AMAN horizon.

Based on Expert’s feedback, DCB and AMAN constraints should be compatible and thus on the same point i.e. the IAF. Other DCB constraints should be far from the IAF so that the pilot could adjust the RBT: the compatibility between the TTA and the CTA, and between any TTO and the CTA has to be checked during validation exercises.

Parameterization

• ATM Service level required:

According to the Expert’s feedback, the most realistic scenario in 2020 seemed to be that only 75% of aircraft will be ATM service level 3 operations capable. Of course, the level of equipage depends on equipment prices, regulatory aspects and service provided by ANPS according to capability.

The remaining 25% of aircraft should be considered as equipped with:

o ADS-B and datalink;

o Conflict detection with surrounding aircraft.

Restrictions and lower priority will be applied to non-equipped aircraft.

• Percentage of aircraft connected to the Network via SWIM in 2020:

Experts were asked to provide their opinion about the most realistic value for the percentage of aircraft connected to the Network via SWIM in 2020. There was high variety of answers.

As final conclusion, Experts assumed that 75% of flights will be connected to SWIM in 2020.

OS-34 Military collaboration in the medium and short term

Airspace Reservation

The experts were asked to provide general information about the military activities nowadays. They are basically classified in:

• Major/Special Exercises: The yearly plan contains the planned exercises in terms of airspace impact e.g. international, national, and regional, altitude, and managed and/or unmanaged airspace. This plan is defined through CDM sessions between

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civilians and MIL. Some weeks before the Day of Operation, the location, size and timeframe of these military activities are refined;

• Day to day Exercises: These activities are planned the day before the Day of Operation or even the same day. Airspace needs for the exercise are coordinated in the medium term planning phase, and day-to-day operations of the military exercises are conducted accordingly. Only tactical changes to the agreed airspace are subject to CDM process.

Airspace Reservation

Regarding the size and shape of the VGA for military exercise, experts agreed on saying that the size of the core region is dependent on the military requirements that are, in turn, dependant on the mission typology e.g. number of aircrafts, mission. For instance, for Eurofighter-Typhoon missions, 100 NM seems reasonable. For flight detections in radar environment (flight identifications, separation assurance, etc.) 50-70 NM is a suitable size.

In the future it is likely that there will be less military aircraft, but due to the specific operational requirements of the new generation military aircraft, they need increased volumes of airspace to train enhanced operational capabilities. To summarize: less missions flown, but with bigger portions of airspace required.

Regarding the length of the lobes a 20% of the core area was agreed.

Scenario

Experts agreed that, potentially, an airspace reservation release may imply capacity gains/opportunities as it is described in the Operational Scenario OS-34. However, the impact may be very variable even not always positive and in any case this impact should be assessed at the regional and sub-regional network level. This impact has to be concisely studied by the Sub-regional and Regional Network Managers e.g. using what-if tools and it can depend on:

• Time before the operation. In this sense, the sooner the airspace release in known the better for taking advantage of it;

• Duration of the release of the Reserved Area;

• Airspace which becomes available.

In any case, an airspace release can be useless in case it induces a negative impact upon the network.

Moreover, Expert Group provided clarification about the DCB process between military and civil. The priority for the military reservations must be ranged taking into account both sides of the problem: the impact in the traffic of passengers and the national defence interest. There will be exceptions, e.g. OPS missions, that may be considered as priority one by the State policies but the SESAR goal is that the airspace has to be shared taking in account the needs of each user i.e. considering Military flights as airspace users with their own specificity.

This military reservation will be the trigger of the negotiation between civil and military:

• 45-60 days before the Day of Operation, the location is negotiated between civil and military;

• 1 week before the Day of Operation, the final snapshot will be tuned. This could be performed even 1 day before, but the involved actors in the negotiation could be different.

The main objective of this negotiation is to maintain the traffic demand without changes or with slight changes, which means, to achieve the necessary capacity without changing the demand i.e. trajectories. However, it might be that a State considers the military ops of highest priority. That is the case of the QRA i.e. Quick Response Alert, a particular

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mission not mentioned in the ConOps that requires the highest priority without negotiation. In this case this assumption is wrong.

The SESAR philosophy is to involve the users at the last moment when there is no solution without changing the traffic demand. The AMC or Airspace Management Cell is responsible for the final decision on the airspace configuration in coordination with the sub-regional manager.

Finally, the Experts were also asked about what may happen if no agreement is reached and which is the timeframe limit to agree a solution. The expert group agreed that the timeframe limit is not a fix value and should be dependent on the magnitude of the trajectory changes and the time horizon of the operation.

In case an agreement is not reached, a set of priorities should be identified as a backup to be applied.

2. Feedback to EP3 WP3.3.2, WP3.3.3 and WP3.3.5 All the assumptions, validation scenarios and hypothesis related to these exercises were reviewed and discussed by the EP3 WP3.3.1 Network Expert Group. Next, just the main outputs of these discussions are summarized. For more details, please refer to EP3 WP3.3.2, EP3 WP3.3.3 and EP3 WP3.3.5 Annexes.

Feedback to EP3 WP3.3.2

Review of the Assumptions:

Assumption: In SESAR IP2 context, no centralised ATFCM multi-constraints ground slot allocation process will operate in the short-term planning phase.

Feedback/conclusion: the expert group does not fully adhere to this assumption. Some experts emphasise that ground delays will remain the safest and most efficient way to manage a congested situation at least for predictable and significant airport arrival traffic demand capacity imbalances. Consequently, there is a need for a ground delay allocation process. Whether this process is centralised or not and should tackle both airport an en-route imbalances has not be discussed in detail.

Considering experts judgement, the exercise should reconsider this assumption as a hypothesis. However due to technical constraints, only a decentralised DCB queuing process will be evaluated in the exercise.

Assumption: The required technical enabler of SWIM enabled NOP is in place. Airlines must have Business Trajectory management for most of their flights to see benefits from dynamic DCB solutions;

Feedback/conclusion: the expert group considers this assumption as sensible. The open question is about the proportion of traffic fully connected to SWIM. As opinions vary from 50 % to 100 % of traffic connected to SWIM, a proportion of 75 % has been chosen in the exercise.

The exercise does not make the distinction between flights connected to SWIM and flights of ATM capability level 3 or more and the capability of AOC systems to manage 4D business trajectories. The exercise will consider that 25 % of the traffic is of ATM capability level 0/1 and is not connected to SWIM. For those flights, the 4D trajectory will be issued by ATM and based on flight plans.

Assumption: Departure airports can accommodate all requests for on-ground delays i.e. there are no constraints on how many aircraft can be delayed on the ground and for how long.

Feedback/conclusion: the expert group considers that this point requires further investigation in the context of airport CDM studies. Some experts express their doubt about issuing DCB/queuing constraints to non-airborne flights shortly before

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departure e.g. in the taxiing phase. They suggest implementing in the SESAR DCB process mechanisms/parameters similar to those in use in current ATFCM operations i.e. TIS/TRS parameters in ETFMS to prevent that. Nevertheless, they agree to consider that, in the context of SESAR IP2, this is an open issue.

Due to the tight planning of Episode 3, this assumption was maintained and can be viewed as a limitation of the exercise.

Review of the Validation Scenarios:

The three main situations identified to be simulated in both the gaming and the process simulations were:

1. Sudden loss of capacity: a non anticipated and immediate runway closure which impacts both AMAN and DCB – e.g. a 50% reduction in runway capacity;

2. Short term loss of capacity: a short notice prediction of LVP conditions that impacts only DCB – e.g. a 30% reduction in runway capacity placed at 08:00 for the period 09:30 to 11:00;

3. Recovery from a loss of capacity: a short notice modification of the LVP period – e.g. from a 30% capacity reduction to 100% available runway capacity where the original end time of 11:00, that is TTA’s issued, changes to 09:00.

Situations 1 and 2 will be combined with situation 3 in the simulation runs to give an overview of the implementation and recovery of the entire dynamic DCB process.

Experts provided the following feedback on those scenarios:

• The selecting cases are relevant;

• Focusing on medium severity congested situations is particularly relevant;

• Addressing similar situations for en-route congestion would be also very interesting.

Experts expressed their interest in playing sessions combining dependant arrival and en-route congestion situations.


Review of the Assumptions:

Assumption: Military traffic can be considered as OAT.

Feedback/conclusion: OAT should be removed and substituted for Mission Trajectories. As far as capacity is concerned, the mission trajectories should be considered as if they were business trajectories and affect the workload of the controller when they fly from their airbase to/from the airspace reservation.

Therefore, the degree of workload affection will be dependent on:

• The distance between the airbase and the airspace reservation;

• The civil traffic density during this aforementioned transition;

• The number of military flights flying to/from the airspace reservation.

Other assumptions regarding the traffic demand or trajectories that are going to be implemented in the exercise are the following:

• The timeframe of the Exercise is medium term close to short term i.e. from one day to two hours before the operation. All trajectories will mainly be SBTs or RBTs just in the case that the origin is really far from the area;

• The mission trajectories should be considered as if they were business trajectories and affect the workload of the controller when they fly from their airbase to the airspace reservation. The degree of workload affection will be dependent on:

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o The distance between the airbase and the airspace reservation;

o The civil traffic density during this aforementioned transition;

o The number of military flights flying to the airspace reservation.

Review of the Validation Scenarios:

The three main situations identified to be simulated in both the gaming and the process simulations were:

Exercise intended to reproduce particular situations of the operational scenario. Two validation scenarios were identified:

• Validation Scenario Example#1: MVPA/VGA planning;

• Validation Scenario Example#2: Release a MVPA/VGA area.

Finally, it was agreed to reproduce an additional situation in the Validation Scenario Example #1: Negotiation Failure and finding a remedy. What happens if no agreement is reached?. It is necessary to identify a timeframe limit to agree a solution when a negotiation failure is performed or triggered as result of the exercise.

Review of the Roles and Responsibilities:

The following point related to roles and responsibilities were refined by experts:

• The AMC closely cooperates with the Sub-Regional network manager for the most efficient use of airspace and at FAB level, the Airspace Manager and the Sub-Regional Manager can be merged in only one role performing all the related functions.


Experts participated in the selection of the Operational Improvements to be implemented in the different simulations and some results about this implementation were presented.

The results were provided from the statement of the hypothesis based on the specification of the Operational Improvement. As it happened with the presentation of other results, experts requested more details about the hypothesis and OIs definition, because different interpretations of the results were otherwise possible.

Some issues and recommendations were identified to be implemented in the creation of the Exercise Report document:

• Hypothesis definition was not clear for the experts: More detail is needed on the statement of the hypothesis together with the OIs linked to it;

• To increase the understanding about the hypothesis and OIs, it was recommended more involvement of the experts in the hypothesis definition;

• In the same way, the interpretation of the results must be more detailed to avoid misunderstandings;

• A high knowledge about the KPIs and KPAs is necessary to understand the results;

• When results show the improvement of an indicator (KPI), it is necessary to explain the baseline situation/scenario used to compare the results with and without the OI implementation.

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10 ANNEX II - SUMMARY OF THE ANALYSIS OF THE SESAR COLLABORATIVE PLANNING INFORMATION: DEMAND AND CAPACITY (D3.3.1-03)

WP 3.3.1 - Analysis of the SESAR Collaborative Planning Information: Demand and Capacity

WP Leader Ineco

Purpose Obtaining the operational details related to Air Traffic Management (ATM) Collaborative Planning Processes for both current and future situation.

SESAR ASPECTS

In order to support SESAR Development Phase whilst ensuring preparation for SESAR Joint Undertaking activities, the analysis of the SESAR collaborative planning information provides an initial assessment of the data shared between the stakeholders identified in Episode 3 ATM Process Model. This exercise produces evidence about the feasibility of some aspects of the SESAR Concept of Operations while performing a preliminary work for its clarification.

Methodology The approach followed in this study consists mainly in establishing a relation with the experts to obtain their feedback about the current and future ATM processes. After extensive analysis of the literature and the current state-of-art, and in order to refine and clarify the roles involved and the information exchanged by the actors, individual meetings and expert groups have been held to obtain opinion and expertise from the professionals.

Main conclusions

• Experts suggested possible improvements to the slot allocation process by improving collaboration between the actors, by better aligning to airline business needs, and by adapting the timeframes (e.g. current 6-monthly slot conference) to meet the flexibility required by airlines;

• Airports should be better integrated into the overall capacity planning of the ATM systems. Currently flight slot allocation by the Network Manager is mainly focused on the airspace capacity, and does not integrate all airport constraints;

• Also, long-term collaborative planning between airlines and airports should be improved to ensure that the infrastructural development of airports meet airlines’ needs;

• With respect to civil/military coordination, problems regarding the harmonisation of civil and military needs were highlighted by the experts. They suggested that in the future, military needs should not prevail when an agreement is not reached ensuring a better balance between military need for training, airlines’ need for using airspace and environmental issues;

• The improvements aimed at in SESAR will actually lead to potential trade-off – and not win-win – situations. It was felt that the increase of predictability required by SESAR could lead to unwanted drawbacks in terms of loss of flexibility and eventually loss of capacity in non-nominal situations. Also it was emphasized that increase in predictability should be delivered in a homogeneous way across all flight segments.

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Exercise Objectives The objective of the Analysis of the SESAR Collaborative Planning Information task, included in EP3 WP3.3.1 Definition of ATM Planning Processes is to obtain the operational details related to the Air Traffic Management (ATM) Collaborative Planning Processes for both the current and the future situation:

• Available information along the long and medium/short term planning phases coming from the different actors – i.e. civil/military users, airports, air navigation service providers and network managers;

• Granularity of the information;

• Criticality of the information;

• Actors involved in every phase of the planning.

Methodology The methodology used to perform the study is based on the following tasks that will be described below:

1. Analysis of the current planning processes from each actor's perspective;

2. Analysis of the information to be shared by each actor through the NOP according to the SESAR 2020 view, with a special accent on the stability and granularity of this information;

3. Impact on the future planning phases due to collaborative planning.

First, to face these tasks, the information was organized according to the processes Ax.y (level 2) defined in the ATM Process Model and has been gathered by:

a. Reviewing and critically analysing reports, studies and statistics done in the past. This activity has been performed by the workgroup contributors, each in his/her field of experience;

b. Discussing the outcome of the activity with in-house selected experts of each workgroup contributor;

c. Discussing the outcome of the activity with external experts (including the EP3 Expert Groups), collecting therefore the similarities and differences (if any) of each partner’s way of operating with respect to its European counterparts.

Four critical actors with wide different interests in the ATM system have been identified to obtain a good analysis of the current situation and of the future impact: users, Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), Network Manager and airports.

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Non-coordinated

aiportsMixed aiports

Military users Commercial -NAT users

Business users

Military ANSPs Civil ANSPs

Network manager

Coordinated aiports

Figure 9: Identified Actors

The specific tasks developed are described hereunder:

Tasks 1 & 2 The authors prepared an initial background of the current situation analysing statistics and specific literature. With this information, questionnaires for the involved actors were prepared by all partners:

• Questionnaire “1- Analysis of the current situation of the information availability” is focused on the current situation.

• Questionnaire “2- Information to be shared: SESAR – 2020” is focused on the future.

To obtain a whole description of the current situation, different ATM processes were identified together with the involved actors for the each of the planning phases. Only the main actors were taken into consideration in each process.

In the workshop which took place in Madrid on April 1 st 2009, two sessions were organised: for the current and the future situation.

• For the current situation, most answers had already been provided by internal interviews and literature analysis. Questions arisen during this previous analysis were asked during the Expert Group meeting to external experts for further clarification.

• For the future situation, all questions were posed during a panel session in which more than one expert was present. This allowed the experts to share their viewpoints and reach commonly agreed results after some discussion. All answers were sent to all interviewees for review and acceptance.

Task 3 Task 3 titled “Impact on the future planning phases due to collaborative planning” was prepared based on the results obtained in the previous questionnaires. This assessment was focused on the interaction between the involved actors and the answers they provided in the first phase. Some hypothesis and assumptions were extracted from experts’ answers and coincidences and divergences were identified.

From divergences, a crossed discussion between involved actors should have been organized to find possible convergences of the results. Unfortunately, time constraints did not

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allow this discussion so the divergences will be highlighted and other external projects should work on them to find a common approach between experts.

Operational Concept SESAR Collaborative layered planning, mediated by network management and based on Collaborative Decision Making (CDM), has the goal of achieving an agreed and stable demand and capacity situation.

This exercise covers this collaborative planning in the short, medium and long terms, including processes such as the design of airport infrastructure, the airlines’ scheduling, the capacity planning by ANSPs, the network management, the flight planning, and the civil/military coordination. Therefore, the basis to this analysis has been the DODs produced in EP3 WP2 which have been further detail and refine regarding information exchange issues.

Conclusions Conclusions are focused on establishing the future relevance, feasibility, deficiencies and potentially added value of collaborative planning as proposed in SESAR documentation.

1. Long-term panning phase: Regarding long term planning phase processes, the main conclusion is that more information than the currently available should be shared between the different stakeholders in order to achieve the promulgated SESAR benefits. Due to the short description of these processes within SESAR ConOps, experts found difficult to go further detailing what exact information they will need in the future. The recommendation is to go on describing the long term planning phase processes and ensure that these descriptions are disseminated to the different stakeholders.

More specific conclusions regarding the processes involved in this planning phase are:

• Airspace segregation should be organised with many small areas instead of a large one as in this case, alternative routes are closer to usual ones. Punctuality, environment and cost indicators for AOs could all be improved by this suggestion;

• A common ECAC solution should be sought and implemented in response to the military airspace reservation issue and its economic impact on AOs;

Airline experts suggest as a possible solution to airspace reservation problem that military users pay for this reservation. Military users disagree with this approach as no other user is paying for it;

• ANSPs’ participation in IATA Slot Conferences is desired by all current participants as both airspace and airport capacity should be considered. A convergence in this process is difficult due to the different expectations of the involved actors;

• Reliever airports dedicated to specific types of traffic are perceived as a good alternative to airports with a mix of all sorts of traffic;

• Users should be more involved and committed to airport infrastructure development.

Long term airport expansions are usually a political decision depending on the congestion level experienced at the airport, but also on strategic decisions related to other airports as reallocating capacity at nearby regional airports may be a solution, community and business development plans, environmental constraints, etc.

In contrast, airlines capacity planning is much quicker since it is directly linked to the market and they will not plan 10 to 20 years ahead. Therefore they can not commit themselves to these long term airport expansions;

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• The existence of EU-policies supporting infrastructure development should be further explored. Today, this development is fragmented, more related to political issues and lacking the necessary overall point of view;

• The implementation of a system of airport terminal ownership by airlines should be further explored.

The ‘American system’ of terminal ownership could improve the involvement of the airlines in some airports, minimising unexpected abandonment of the airlines. Conversely, airlines typically depend on their base airport which may or may not decide to expand.

The implementation of this system might lead to better quality of service to passengers, due to improved exploitation of the terminals;

• Coordination between States when multinational routes are in place should improve.

FABs are perceived by experts as a good chance for further improvement as the own national knowledge of each of the participants could optimise the process with an overall output, achieving agreements with the parts and fulfilling the expectations of all the involved members;

• Traffic prediction is believed to be the most critical and sensitive information used in the ATM resource planning process.

As they are closely linked to the long term staffing and resource provision, experts consider that any inaccuracy in these data will produce a wrong dimensioning of the staff. Usually, unpredictable events have a deep impact in traffic predictions;

• Quality of the information is much more critical than the information itself. In SESAR IP-2 improvements are expected in the content and the quality of the input data, sharing the outputs of the process via the SWIM enabled NOP;

• The Network Manager typically does not take airport capacity into account, which is a collaborative planning gap between Airports and the Network Managers.

The issue of the airport being involved in the balancing between airport and airspace capacity was raised during the experts’ meeting because coordination in this matter would avoid mismatches between these capacities. From the perspective of the airports, the main problem is the lack of impact assessment by Network Manager on airport capacity when CFMU slots are issued;

• The Network Manager should suggest the best option among different flight plans to the AOs instead of all the possible options.

This suggestion applies both for long and medium-short term. A search route program capable of showing the current CDRs and RADs was suggested. This will allow users to minimise costs and optimise their routes, providing earlier and more accurate SBTs;

• There is a lack of supporting legislation framework regarding ATCOs mobility along Europe.

This legislation framework would be perceived by the experts as a helpful tool to mitigate staff shortages. However, no result is expected in the short term due to legislative problems, licenses problems and ATCOs unions’ opposition.

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2. Medium and short-term planning phase: • Harmonization of the civil-military coordination processes throughout the ECAC area

is desirable.

Planning traffic and airspace requirements are usually compromised by this constraint. A better coordination could lead to an enhanced use of the airspace and therefore to more airspace availability;

• Accuracy of meteorological nowcasts and forecasts is considered to be very critical when planning military operations.

Military users would like to have more efficient information on the expected civil traffic. On the other hand, knowing military flight intentions in advance would help commercial users to plan their operations and to refine their SBTs. However, military flight plans cannot be done earlier due to weather constraints.

This is not the only complaint about meteorological data. When asking experts about what they consider missed in the SESAR ConOps, they stress the importance of weather since some airports are very sensitive to it. Weather nowcasts and forecasts have an impact on runway operations, on separations, on staffing and workload, and on capacity and delays;

• AOs lack information on route catalogues and they suggest that DAEDALUS should take into account the daily constraints and should be fully implemented.

Static route catalogues are not completely useful for the users as suitable solutions could change dramatically when availability of route changes dynamically. A decrease of workload for the involved staff is expected with these new technologies;

• Emphasize the importance of considering the airport and the TMA (even the en-route adjacent sectors) as a whole system.

In this planning phase, improvement of airport infrastructure or operations may imply at least 5 – 10% increase in capacity. For this reason, ATC should react in the same way so as not to be the limiting factor;

• AOs showed their concern about delay management in SESAR 2020 environment, in which they are the RBT owners.

Questions regarding to RBT property, delay responsibility and RBT concept clarification is expected from the users’ point of view;

• NAT tracks were criticised for being so far north. Not taking them will imply flying a FL different to the nominal one and burning more fuel what increases environmental and economic costs.

Traffic predictions in this planning phase should be based on data from Airspace Users and reliable airport movements’ data instead of on historical data. This way, uncertainties and unpredicted events could be taken into account;

• Main airlines’ complains relate to the fact that they would like a slot allocation system that helps companies to meet passenger demand and not oriented to solve the airport capacity problem.

To support this, they suggest an increase in flexibility of the IATA SC, e.g. by increasing the number of Conferences per year or by doing ‘ad-hoc’ conferences; a procedure such as slot negotiation between different airlines; a publication of flight intentions previous IATA SC and a major involvement of airports in the slot allocation process;

• Airports should be involved in any demand change decision made by Airlines as early as possible. An increase of efficiency at the airport side is expected from the users’ point of view as slot and stand capacity will not be wasted;

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• Collaborative processes should be implemented in the slot allocation process based on both airport and airspace capacity constraints. To contribute to this aim, CFMU delays should be fully integrated into the airport systems.

Airports would benefit on this coordination improving their predictability and time efficiency;

• Current CFMU-slot is not contributing to maximum departure throughput as in case of exceeding this capacity delays build up at the airport.

Departure throughput could be maximised if clear and efficient communication between airport and CFMU was held. Medium-term planning data availability is crucial to succeed with the slot allocation process;

• Handling agencies should consider predictability instead of delays to plan their staff more accurately.

Improvement from SESAR is expected when updated EOBTs at early stages are shared between all involved actors. Allowing handling agencies to access to this information will ease the re-organization of ground services resources;

• Taxi time calculation should be improved as typically average taxi times are used at airports. However, ANSPs are not completely satisfied with this factor and would prefer a better planning calculation, though they are conscious that this enhancement of predictability and stability will lead into an increase of costs.

In general, a trade-off needs to be carefully established between adherence to RBTs according to a precise schedule and the need to keep some flexibility to manage disruptions;

• Reactionary delays are due to late arrivals and lack of coordination between the actors involved in the slot allocation process.

Experts think it is desirable and worthwhile to make airport operations less sensitive to “connectivity” of scheduled operations if these operations deserve a certain priority in scheduling. Instead of assigning penalties in case of constrained operations at a network level, they express their preference on developing incentives for collaborative operators;

• Wake vortices detection technology, separation standards and procedural alternatives to the "First Planned - First Served" policy should be further explored;

• Environment is also becoming an issue for experts. Therefore, the creation of standards about NO x measurements for airport and a compilation of best practices regarding sustainability performance are considered as beneficial;

• Many of the improvements aimed at in SESAR will actually lead to trade-off situations.

Experts encourage SESAR to list these types of trade-off and, if possible, to quantify them. For instance, when improving the predictability of operations, this may lead to a reduction of flexibility at a tactical level and possibly to bigger knock-on delays under certain circumstances. Values like stability of operations, capacity, and flexibility should be regarded as a triangle: the increase of any of these factors will have a negative effect on the others.

In summary, the results of this exercise include useful information in relation to the shortcomings that should be addressed and in some cases, suggestions on how to solve them in the early stages of SESAR. However, due to the lack of familiarity of the experts with SESAR and to the high level definition of certain future processes, there are fewer recommendations addressing the 2020 context. So this work should be considered as an initial study to be continued in the context of SESAR.

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11 ANNEX III - SUMMARY OF THE AIRPORT DATA EXCHANGE EXPERT GROUP (D3.3.1-04)

WP3.3.1 Airport Data Exchange Expert Group WP Leader EUROCONTROL

Purpose The aim of the expert group has been to provide an initial description of the most useful operational information which could be shared with the “outside world” of an airport as a means to identifying the content of a European portal which could be used to provide a rapid view on the performance status of a particular airport.

Concept The quality of information accessible for an airline Operations Control Centre (OCC) relating to ‘remote’2 airport operations is variable and the method of gaining access to such information is non-standard. Whilst, for example, the quality of information relating to the hub at a given airport (e.g. CDG) for both the main airline (e.g. Air France) and other incumbent airlines (notably as a result of the CDM initiative) can be considered as high, the same cannot always be said for the remote airports.

Typically the use made by an OCC of airport operational data relates to the tactical management of flights as well as the pre-tactical (1-2 days ahead) tuning of operations. For remote airports, the access to information can be through various sources (local duty manager, CFMU, teleconferences, etc) and this is on a case by case basis.

For certain airports (e.g. at Schiphol), a regular teleconference with users is held which provides valuable operational information. However, access to such teleconferences is not always obvious or practical for non home-based airlines. Also a teleconference may not always be the most appropriate method for flight operations management.

Methodology In the context of Episode 3 Collaborative Planning activities (WP3) an expert group, comprising airline OCC and ATC operational expertise, has been set up for the discussing the issues stated above. The deliberations have been presented according to a number of “themes”.

Main conclusions

Whilst limiting itself to a discussion on potential operational information, the airline experts stressed the importance that they place in the construction of an early ‘mock-up’ of such a portal so as to be able to focus on usability issues relating to the interface as well as enabling the elaboration of additional requirements.

This European portal should be seen as a first ‘port of call’ or ‘dashboard’ whereby an airline OCC can rapidly visualise whether an airport is functioning nominally or whether performance is degraded in any way. In order to achieve such functionality, a typical interface using appropriate colours (green = OK, red = severely degraded, for example) is envisaged. Once a degraded performance in a particular area for an airport is highlighted, the user would then be directed to the local airport site (typically that developed as part of a CDM initiative) in order to obtain more detailed information.

It is recognised that these local sites require different access authorisations,

2 The term ‘remote’ is used to mean ‘away from the home base’.

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employ different user interfaces and have different levels of functionality. Whilst there is possibly a case that could be made for a completely centralised and uniform information source, the requirements of such an interface are considered to lie outside the scope of this expert group. Furthermore, a centralised information source cannot achieve the same level of detail or replace some of the ‘local’ functionality inherent in certain airport CDM sites such as, for example, the possibilities for direct dialogue (‘chat’) with the weather information service provider.

The expert group activity has been developed during a series of meetings between EUROCONTROL, Air France and LVNL. An initial kick-off meeting was held for the participants to agree on the objectives of the expert group, its working methods and particularly its scope. Subsequent working meetings considered the specific data requirements applicable to each of the “themes” which the group had agreed upon during the kick-off meeting. The particular themes which formed the focus of the group were:

• Meteorological information;

• ATC information;

• Airport information;

• Airline information;

• Communication methods.

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12 ANNEX IV - SUMMARY OF THE COLLABORATIVE AIRPORT PLANNING EXPERT GROUP REPORT (D3.3.1-05)

WP3.3.1 Collaborative Airport Planning WP Leader EUROCONTROL

Purpose

To elaborate within an expert group environment a number of services which the Total Airport Management (TAM) concept should enable and provide a high-level breakdown of the content of the Airport Operational Plan (AOP) which will be necessary if these services are to be realised. One key element of the future concept will be the notion of performance monitoring and re-planning in the event of deviations from the agreed performance levels. In this context, the group sought to elaborate an initial framework for both an ‘aircraft monitor’ and a ‘passenger monitor’ which will both be necessary if the objective of full airside and landside integration is to be realised.

SESAR ASPECTS

The SESAR Consortium, during the programme definition phase identified the need to build on the A-CDM foundation as a means of strengthening the information sharing between airports and the wider network but to specifically reinforce the collaborative element of the local airport decision making process. The following R&D requirement was identified as being necessary for the SESAR development phase:

“Study of airport processes associated with common understanding of a common planning process, common situational awareness and a common performance framework, as well as the tools to visualise the predicted performance (capacity, environmental load, delay etc) as these do not exist today, nor do the procedures.”3

A fundamental aspect of the future SESAR concept is the evolution toward a performance based ATM system. This notion of performance management is therefore a cornerstone of the future airport concept which foresees an “integrated” airport management framework, where all major aircraft operator, airport, aerodrome ATC and ground handling processes are conducted using common data sets and agreed procedures. This future method of airport management, can, with some justification, be referred to as Total Airport Management (TAM).

Methodology Process analysis in an expert group environment.

Main Conclusions

The Airport Operations Plan (AOP) is fundamental to the future collaborative planning concept. However, SESAR must address not only the question of the content of the AOP and how that content varies over time, but crucially it must address how the AOP is to be used as the vehicle which ensures the monitoring of the airport performance against agreed performance criteria.

Episode 3 has provided the opportunity to start this development, focusing on the high-level AOP content but particularly on the initial development of a fully integrated airside and landside monitoring system.

3 SESAR DLT-0612-222-00-15 DRAFT0.15, Page 189.

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Validation Objectives The SESAR Operational Concept states that airport operations during the medium/short term planning phase will be built upon the framework of Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) but with further enhancements to the decision making process. In the current system, despite improved data sharing, notably through the A-CDM initiative there still remains the reality that operational decisions within an airport are implemented largely as the result of “reactive management” rather than “predictive management”. Invariably the “solution” is limited to maximising the immediate interests of those responsible for making a given decision. SESAR therefore proposes a concept whereby operational decisions, particularly those during periods of reduced capacity, taken by any given airport actor may be made in the full knowledge of the operational constraints and/or priorities of other actors who may be impacted by the decision. The management of degraded situations will therefore be improved, coupled with an earlier recovery to normal operations. The focus of this study is therefore in the “Airport Planning” phase as illustrated below:

SCOPE OF THE DOCUMENT

Figure 10: ATM Planning phases

A fundamental aspect of the future SESAR concept is the evolution toward a performance based ATM system. This notion of performance management is therefore a cornerstone of the future airport concept which foresees an “integrated” airport management framework, where all major aircraft operator, airport, aerodrome ATC and ground handling processes are conducted using common data sets and agreed procedures. This future method of airport management, can, with some justification, be referred to as Total Airport Management (TAM).

The results provided in this study are intended to provide early information, guidance and risk reduction to SJU Work Package 6.5.1.

Particular areas that the attention of the Expert Group has focussed on are the following:

• The move from “reactive management of situations” to “predictive management”;

• A Performance based management approach. This is clearly reflected in the ‘passenger monitor’ presented later in the report;

• Situational awareness (monitoring): airside, landside and the link between them;

• The potential for increased predictability to reduce buffers in the system;

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• The importance of improved data (information) sharing to increase operational efficiency;

• Current operational problems and the possibility to either solve them or at least better manage them in a collaborative environment – as a means of ‘validating’ the concept ideas.

The Expert Group – participation and methodology The participants in the expert group were from the following organisations:

• Acciona Ground Handling Services;

• AENA PMI Airport Operations;

• Air Berlin;

• Air Europa;

• EasyJet;

• IBERIA Ramp Handling Services.

It was agreed that the expert group sessions would focus on the turn-round and boarding processes and the passenger flows. The “timely integration” of these different processes and flows is a fundamental element of the TAM concept. Therefore the expert group focus was on the underlying processes and the necessary information sharing between them in order to achieve the required level of integration.

Each expert group session was structured so as to focus on a description of the way that relevant processes are performed today and, more importantly, how it was considered that these processes could and should be performed in the future from the perspective of enhancing overall efficiency and ultimately the on-time departure of flights. Therefore each expert group sought to extract:

• A detailed description of the existing process which each organisation is involved in. Typical questions posed by the project team related to the decision making process, the information which is shared and its accuracy.

• Typical problems which can occur and the reasons for these problems but particularly the shortcomings in the existing process which may not allow such problems to be foreseen or easily managed.

• An understanding of how the existing operation could be enhanced so as to improve both the predictability and the overall efficiency. This may include the provision of data which today is either not available or is of poor quality, or a change to the way in which the operation is currently performed.

• An understanding of relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each process and how the process may be monitored in real-time so that deviations from the planning may be detected and thereby permitting decisions to be taken in a timelier manner.

The airport Operations plan – proposed themes The TAM concept should be based on three “pillars”:

1. A collaborative Airport Operations Plan (AOP).

2. An Airport Performance framework with specific performance targets.

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3. An Airport Operations Centre (APOC). Within the TAM concept, the APOC is seen as the platform which permits operators to communicate and co-ordinate, to develop and maintain dynamically joint plans and to execute those in their respective area of responsibility. The main information source shared between the actors in the APOC is therefore the AOP. The APOC should therefore be equipped with a real-time monitoring system, a decision support system and a set of collaborative procedures which will ensure a fully integrated management of landside & airside airport processes .

The integration of these pillars will therefore lead to the provision of a number of “services” as follows:

• Performance Planning Service;

• Monitoring and alerting Service;

• Decision Support Service;

• Analysis Service.

There will be two main references used in the management of (the) airport operations, the AOP and the agreed Airport Performance Targets. The AOP will include traffic demand, the availability of resources and the updated knowledge of any element or event that may affect airport operation. The agreed Airport Performance Targets constitute the other key reference to be used in the airport management, firstly in the elaboration of the AOP and secondly in the real time process of updating the AOP.

In order to facilitate the above services, the AOP content has been divided into a number of themes defined as follows:

AOP theme High level Content AOP 1 Demand / Capacity Assessment. Assessment of demand and resource

availability. Comprising flight plans, airport slots, special events, work in progress, strategic planning, airport configurations, capacities, airport infrastructure, equipment availability,…

AOP2 Performance Trade-off Assessment. Priority setting between the selected performance areas (Safety, Capacity, Time-Efficiency, Predictability, Environmental Sustainability and Flexibility).

AOP3 Monitoring the AOP. Detection of deviations from planning and raising of alerts, supported by:

• A Common Traffic Situational Awareness (‘aircraft monitor’);

• A Common Passenger Situational Awareness, provided by landside monitoring systems (‘passenger monitor’).

AOP4 Decision making support. Appropriate algorithms to assess potential impact of proposed changes to the AOP. This will be closely linked to the performance trade-off assessment (AOP2).

AOP5 Management. Implementation of existing A-CDM procedures, particularly the pre-departure sequence based on the Target Off block Time (TOBT). Also integration of new TAM procedures to improve TOBT accuracy and fully integrate landside and airside processes.

Table 3: Proposed AOP themes

When addressing the question of the monitoring service which will be provided following the implementation of the AOP, the experts focussed their attention on two separate processes, namely the ‘aircraft process’ and the ‘passenger process’. The aircraft process covers the link between arriving and departing flights (primarily within the turn-round task although enriched with other data available through A-CDM) and the passenger process covers those ‘landside gates’ (security, customs etc) which the passenger is required to pass through. The timely

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integration of the two processes (which ideally occurs simultaneously at the commencement of boarding) is identified as being fundamental to the on-time departure of flights.

The main objective is to ensure the full synchronisation of passenger and aircraft flows. These two processes meet at the “Boarding Meeting Point”; i.e. the aircraft status being “boarding” and the passenger status being “boarding gate open”. Both departure passengers from the airport and transit passenger flows are addressed in this section.

In order to monitor the passenger flow, different sub-processes have been identified, starting at the check in sub-process (the access of passengers to the airport sub-process is an external input to the passenger monitor) and ending at the transit time of passengers from the last control sub-process to the gate.

In order to assess passenger process synchronisation with the aircraft process, a productivity performance indicator has been defined and assigned to each sub process. Performance indicators should be chosen to facilitate situational diagnosis so that mitigation actions can be triggered in order to recover the initially planned situation or to develop a new AOP if necessary, for example in the case of a heavy disruption.

Passenger process alerts can be triggered if the combined sub-process productivity indicates a risk of compromise. These alerts must be based on an agreed deviation from the standard performance; base-line or quality of service performance to be used as the performance reference for alert triggering. A similar analysis can be done for transit passengers. In this situation a new aircraft status is introduced in the aircraft arrival phase: De-boarding status and a new de-boarding sub-process for the transit passenger flow.

Two key reference indicators have been identified as having a major influence in the Check-in and Security Screening sub-processes performance. The first, most influencing factor is the sub-process throughput, which will have a direct impact in the second key performance reference indicator: the sub-process time (queue + check-in or screening time).

For local passengers, the monitoring of each individual applicable process allows to derive an overall process time (referred to as the ‘P parameter’ within the expert group discussions) allowing determination of the necessity for an alarm indicating that the passenger flow and the TOBT are inconsistent:

Check -in SecurityProcess time

Passportprocesstime

BoardingCheck -in SecurityProcess time

Passportprocesstime


Passportprocesstime

Boarding

The associated alarm, ‘Risk of late arrival to the gate’, will be generated if:

TOBT < P + Current Time + K where P is determined through the real-time process monitors and also takes into account the pure ‘walking time’ as a function of the check-in area and aircraft gate. The parameter k is a pseudo process time related to the boarding process which is typically expected to be of the order of 5 to 10 minutes although this requires confirmation during operational validation.

Check -in SecurityProcess time

Passportprocesstime


Passportprocesstime


Passportprocesstime

Boarding

The associated alarm, ‘Risk of late arrival to the gate’, will be generated if:

TOBT < P + Current Time + K where P is determined through the real-time process monitors and also takes into account the pure ‘walking time’ as a function of the check-in area and aircraft gate. The parameter k is a pseudo process time related to the boarding process which is typically expected to be of the order of 5 to 10 minutes although this requires confirmation during operational validation.

Figure 11: Local passenger process time analysis

For transit passengers, the necessity for an alert is determined through monitoring the relationship between the time of de-boarding and the TOBT. Therefore, the real-time monitoring process should be in a position to calculate the time required from opening the aircraft doors to the passenger being able to present themselves at the boarding gate for their onward flight. This time is essentially an issue of the physical distance and the process time associated with transit passenger security checks.

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All process times must be associated to a threshold level (parameter) to raise alerts for launching predefined procedures.

The A-CDM development process has already addressed the issue of ‘multiple TOBTs’ within various fora. It is important to note that the approach described here does not advocate the issuing of more than one TOBT. Instead, the single TOBT which is issued to ATC and shared between the partners should be derived automatically, where appropriate, from information emanating from more than one source.

Conclusions The Airport Operations Plan (AOP) is fundamental to the future collaborative planning concept. However, SESAR must address not only the question of the content of the AOP and how that content varies over time, but crucially it must address how the AOP is to be used as the vehicle which ensures the monitoring of the airport performance against agreed performance criteria. The collaborative processes which ensure that the AOP is modified in an appropriate way in the event of deviations will also occupy much of the time of those involved in the SESAR Definition Phase.

Episode 3 has provided the opportunity to start this development has provided a detailed insight into the deliberations and work of the expert group. The focus of their work has been on the high-level AOP content but particularly on the initial development of a fully integrated airside and landside monitoring system. A potential architecture and a proposal for some automatic alerting mechanisms is the fruit of this reflection.

This exercise has left the authors with the belief that the expert group process is a valuable tool particularly at the early stage of concept development. However, a number of pre-conditions should be met and issues borne in mind.

Detailed discussions on particular concept elements are best held using small, ‘common interest’ groups. This is particularly the case for airports, where the principal actors are performing different operational functions and with very different constraints. This approach ensures maximum relevance of the discussion at all times and also ensures the maximum participation of each individual. Only when the initial ideas reach a certain level of maturity should the information be presented to a much wider audience where there is an increased possibility of conflict between actors or the emergence of ‘dominant’ individuals.

Operational experts are expert in the ‘current’ system and, with few exceptions, it is not necessarily a trivial process for them to focus on future, more abstract, ideas. The approach adopted with PMI which was essentially that of simple, open questions along the lines:

“How does the current process work? What can go wrong? Why does it go wrong? What can be done to improve the situation? What information would you like to have in a more timely fashion? etc

seemed to work very well.

The use of support material in the form of mock-up through to fast-time simulation is important provided the right balance between the tool functionality and concept development is maintained. The use of static and “dry” documentation should be avoided wherever possible.

The right balance concerning the frequency of the expert group sessions should be found. Sufficient regularity is necessary to maintain the momentum of the group but it is important that progress is seen to be made between the meetings and that new material is available each time so as to maintain interest. As a result, the workload of the project team between the sessions should not be underestimated.

As a final recommendation, it is strongly urged that the SESAR Joint Undertaking and the SESAR Airports Consortium (SEAC) form their own opinion as to the utility of this work. In the

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event of a positive conclusion, these organisations should take the necessary steps to ensure that the work is carried forward within the SESAR Development Phase.

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13 ANNEX V - SUMMARY OF THE SIMULATION REPORT ON BUSINESS TRAJECTORY MANAGEMENT AND DYNAMIC (D3.3.2-02)

WP3.3.2 Dynamic DCB and Business Trajectory Management WP Leader EUROCONTROL

Purpose

The key concept elements addressed in this exercise are business trajectory management and dynamic DCB. More precisely, the exercise addresses the collaborative processes to dynamically adjust the demand to the available capacity in the short-term planning and execution phases. It is assumed in this exercise that the capacity has been previously optimised to the maximum extent.

The full definition of UDPP is out of the scope of this exercise. Therefore, the exercise focuses on the management of sufficiently significant demand / capacity imbalances that require the re-planning of business trajectories by airspace users, but being below the level of severity that would trigger the UDPP process.

SESAR ASPECTS

The exercise addresses the management of arrival traffic congestion situations –mainly at large or medium size airports- in the short-term planning and execution phases.

The SESAR ConOps introduces the following set of concept elements that will have a deep impact on the way arrival traffic will be adapted to the available airport capacity both in the short term and execution phases:

• Queue management will allow a significant extension of the geographical and temporal scope for arrival congestion management in the execution phase;

• Business trajectory management both in the short-term planning (SBT) and the execution phases (RBT);

• Dynamic Demand and Capacity Balancing (DCB);

• UDPP (User Defined Prioritisation Process).

Hypothesis

Main hypothesis are:

• The proposed DCB process is feasible as a realistic means to apply dynamic DCB solutions;

• In the execution phase, there are two distinct processes/layers addressing arrival queue management:

o The AMAN process working at a local/sub-regional level;

o The dynamic DCB process applied to flights in execution phase and working at network level in anticipation of an AMAN.

• The share of responsibilities between regional, sub-regional and local actors related to the definition and implementation of dynamic DCB solutions e.g. TTAs allocations, will evolve in the context of SESAR.

• An airspace user as owner of the 4D business trajectory has total freedom when planning/re-planning an SBT as far as the permanent/structural restrictions and dynamic DCB/ASM constraint(s) are respected.

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Main measures

The analysis of the dynamic DCB concept was performed through two parallel experiments using different techniques:

• Platform-based gaming (using a tool called DARTIS); DARTIS is a platform that is used as the means for people (game players) to deploy dynamic DCB measures against simulated imbalances and adapt business trajectories in consequences. Several games are played, with each game consisting of a different scenario and/or a different configuration of the dynamic DCB process. The games provide qualitative and quantitative information for scrutiny by analysts and operational experts;

• Process Simulation which are particularly useful at revealing hidden incoherencies arising from the relations between actors involved and their responsibilities. PROMAS was developed to assess dynamic DCB measures and BT management against different scenarios (traffic samples, events, dynamic DCB strategies…). The outputs are principally quantitative but also qualitative.

Validation Objectives The whole exercise was defined as an initial building block in support to the SESAR validation programme rather than as a self-contained validation activity that would provide definitive answers to a set of validation questions. In that context two main objectives were defined with an emphasis on the second one.

1. Clarification on the SESAR Concept The exercise aimed at clarifying the SESAR Concept related to the collaborative planning processes for the management of arrival traffic at a congested airport focusing on the short-term phase and partially execution phase (i.e. planning time horizon from several hours to 40 minutes before arrival).

The exercise aimed at clarifying the SESAR Concept on the following aspects:

• Definition of the areas of responsibility of dynamic DCB and AMAN processes in the context of the management of congested arrival flows and study of their interface. This includes in particular the study of:

o The respective time planning horizons of Dynamic DCB and AMAN;

o The situations in which the Dynamic DCB should apply and the type of traffic situation it should deliver to the downstream AMAN process;

o The granularity and level of accuracy at which the Dynamic DCB process should work.

• Roles and responsibilities of planners in arrival planning processes and in particular the share of responsibilities between local / sub-regional and regional actors;

• Interactions between DCB processes and business trajectory management (including both SBTs and RBTs) for the management of time constraints;

• Real-time network monitoring functions and support tools (e.g. NOPLA applications) and automation of network management tasks;

• UDPP scope and triggering conditions;

• Operational requirements related to the dynamic DCB TTA allocation process;

• Multi-Constraint Management - Interaction between en-route DCB processes and arrival DCB Processes.

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2. Exploration of new validation techniques More precisely the objectives of the exercise are:

• To assess innovative validations techniques suited to early stages (E-OCVM V1) of concept validation including:

o Human-in-the-loop platform-based gaming technique;

o Advanced model-based process simulation technique.

• To initiate the set-up of a validation infrastructure (including platforms and methodologies) that could be reused in the context of the SESAR validation program for network operations.

Airspace Information The operational context for the validation activities corresponds to a significant part of the ECAC area divided in sub-regions corresponding approximately to FABs (or sub-areas of FABs) as illustrated in the following diagram.

SRM 4

LEMD

SRM 1

SRM 3

SRM 2

LIRF

LIML

LEBL

Figure 12: FABs in the ECAC area

The exercise focuses on the management of arrival traffic at four airports: LEMD (Madrid), LEBL (Barcelona), LIML (Milano) and LIFR (Roma).

The gaming exercise considers current airspace structures and route network. Nominal sector opening schemes were used during the gaming simulations.

Traffic Information The gaming exercise uses adapted traffic samples based on current traffic. The traffic samples were built from recorded traffic on 16th January 2009 corresponding to the AIRAC 317 environment (used for training), and 20th, 25th and 26th March 2009 corresponding to the AIRAC 319.

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Flight data are based on actual records from CFMU’s European Traffic Flow Management ETFMS (EFD messages) which allows simulating realistically the constant evolution of the traffic demand during the day of operations.

The process Simulations uses the 2020 traffic sample supplied by EP3 WP2.

Simulation Scenarios Both in the gaming and the process simulation, three types of situations are simulated and eventually combined:

1. Sudden loss of arrival capacity at one airport.

2. Short term loss of arrival capacity: a short notice prediction of low visibility procedural conditions that impacts only dynamic DCB.

3. Recovery from a loss of arrival capacity.

Validation scenarios focuses on capacity shortfall/recovery events only because it was a convenient way to generate imbalances using current traffic samples. More generally the dynamic DCB process aims to address any situation of demand capacity imbalances detected with short notice.

The gaming scenarios also integrate the simulation of overloads in some particular en-route airspaces that include arrival flows to the considered congested airports (to simulate interaction between en-route and arrival DCB processes).

The following diagram provides an overview of the general process that is simulated for each of the situations mentioned above.

UDPPUDPPDCB pre-sequence calculation

Allocation of TTAs


AMAN sequence update

Emission of CTAs

RBTs revision (flight crew)



Capacity shortfall/recovery notification in NOP

Severesituation

Need for anticipateddynamic DCB measures

Continuousupdateprocess

Figure 13: Overview of the dynamic DCB process

Actors The actors that are involved with implementing dynamic DCB solutions include:

• Sub-Regional Network managers for the FABs handling the constrained airport’s main arrival flows;

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• The Regional Network Manager, with a view of the entire ECAC area;

• The APOC of the constrained airport;

• APOCs of the departure airports affected by the constraint (no human actor in the gaming);

• Several airlines (AOC and flight crew) who will be involved in implementing the dynamic DCB solutions;

• ATC:

o Gaming: one generic ATC role (when TTA is allocated to airborne flights, simplistic negotiation with the flight crew to agree the way of achieving it);

o Process Simulations: specific ATC roles; ATS Supervisor (TWR), Executive Controller (Arrival TMA) and Executive Controller (ACC).

Validation Technique The exercise combines human-in-loop gaming sessions and automatic process simulations conducted respectively by EUROCONTROL’s Experimental Centre (EEC) and INECO. Those two activities address the same operational scenarios dealing with the management of arrival (mainly) and en-route (partly) demand-capacity imbalances that are predicted to occur in the short-term planning and execution phases.

1. Gaming technique The programme consisted of five different games during the course of a three days session. The games given above were executed in two different ways – ‘step by step’ and ‘free’:

• Games that are played ‘free’ are those where DARTIS is played in real-time, and Game Players play their role in the game as best they can, without pause;

• Games that are ‘step by step’ are those where the Game Manager runs the game for a short while, and then stops. The pause is used to ask the Game Players technical questions. While the game is running the Game Players play their roles, following a detailed script. The script tells the Game Players what actions to carry out and when. There are several pauses during the course of the game, allowing the Game Manager to ask detailed questions on a variety of occurrences in the game. The duration of a step by step game is longer than that of a ‘free’ game.

As the Gaming experiment focuses on concept refinement rather than concept assessment much of the collected data are subjective. These data were captured from the game players during step-by-step gaming sessions, debriefing sessions and questionnaires.

In complement to the gaming human-in-the-loop sessions, it was decided to proceed to additional simulations by using DARTIS in a fast-time simulation mode to study quantitatively the impact of some operational parameters (such as the time horizons of AMAN and dynamic DCB). Six scenarios were constructed, and each one was run four times. In those fast-time simulations, gaming actors decisions were simulated automatically based on pre-defined rules.

2. Process simulation Process simulations relying on the PROMAS platform are particularly useful at revealing hidden incoherencies arising from the relations between actors involved and their responsibilities. PROMAS was developed to assess dynamic DCB measures and BT management against different scenarios (traffic samples, events, dynamic DCB strategies…). The outputs are principally quantitative but also qualitative.

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Results Next the main results obtained from the gaming sessions are summarized per high-level validation objective:

1. Clarification on the concept The whole exercise was defined as an initial building block in support to the SESAR validation programme rather than as a self-contained validation activity that would provide definitive answers to a set of validation questions. Therefore only high level conclusions are presented and even those should be taken very cautiously. Further investigation is required before the conclusions can be truly accepted as valid.

Concept clarification was addressed through the qualitative study of the following topics:

Scope of Dynamic DCB, AMAN and their Interface The DOD E4 [21] identifies at least two ATM processes that can contribute to the management of arrival congestion when an imbalance is detected at relatively short notice. These processes are:

• A continuous AMAN process working mainly on airborne flights within a limited look-ahead time horizon. This AMAN process manages accurate arrival sequences and issues CTAs that are managed on the airborne side by RTAs;

• An upstream Dynamic DCB process. This process pre-sequences flights (only when a significant imbalance is detected) through the dynamic allocation/re-allocation of TTAs and the consequent adaptation of business trajectories by airspace users.

Those two processes were simulated in the Gaming experiment to provide a clear demonstration of how they could be combined. The gaming participants considered that this breakdown was relevant for the following reasons:

• It allows the definition of a clear boundary between network and local/tactical processes and the clarification of roles and responsibilities;

• It allows the design of a seamless arrival management process covering both the short-term planning and execution phases, whilst allowing the type of measure/time constraint to be adapted to the level of the congestion and the accuracy of the traffic picture;

• By coherently managing flights in the short-term planning and execution phases, it allows time-based measures to be dynamically adapted to achieve an optimum balance between ground and airborne delays.

The two processes were viewed by most of the experts as two constituent elements of the queue management concept mentioned in the ConOps.

The experts considered that the following KPAs should be positively impacted by the implementation of these processes:

• Efficiency through an optimal management of delays when any exist;

• Predictability.

Roles and Responsibilities The conclusions that can be drawn about roles and responsibilities are as follows:

• The AMAN sequence (even considering an increased horizon) is under the responsibility of the APOC/TMA manager. Network managers are not directly involved in the process;

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• The actor triggering and managing the dynamic DCB TTA allocation process should be the Sub-Regional Network Manager of the sub-region that has the congested airport. The decision to trigger the dynamic DCB solution must be coordinated with the APOC and the Regional Network Manager;

• Airspace users are owners of their business trajectories and are in charge of replanning the business trajectories to take into account the DCB time-based constraints. Only the flight crew is involved in the management of constraints issued by the AMAN process. However, the management of time-based constraints issued by the dynamic DCB process (TTAs) would be primarily under the responsibility of the AOC. For flights in execution phase, the AOC must work in close cooperation with the flight crew.

Interactions Between Business Trajectory Management and Dynamic DCB The procedures implemented in the simulations allowed the airspace users to decide how to absorb arrival delays through 4D business trajectory re-planning. The procedures were judged as globally acceptable from an airspace user point of view. However, some operational parameters need to be refined, in particular, the maximum response time allowed following the reception of a TTA (five minutes was played in the Gaming). It was also identified that in case of a capacity shortfall anticipated at short notice, the AOC staff of the main airline operating at a congested airport would probably be overloaded and could only focus on a limited number of flights (the most critical ones from a business point of view).

The network managers expressed their disagreement about the business trajectory management procedures implemented in the gaming platform. Their opinion is that, in order to increase efficiency of the overall process and reduce risk of increased complexity in terminal airspace, business trajectories respecting TTAs should first be determined by ATM taking into account network constraints and then proposed to airspace users who could then make counter-proposals.

Real-Time Network Monitoring Function and Support Tools The need to define advanced tools/applications (i.e. NOPLA applications) in support of the network/traffic monitoring tasks and the collaborative management of business trajectories was clearly identified. Some high-level requirements for advanced functions in support of the future network monitoring tasks were identified including:

• Advanced what-if functions allowing the impact of DCB measures and airspace users’ replies to be assessed;

• Advanced traffic monitoring indicators including complexity and performance factors, both for en-route and TMAs;

• Context-oriented alerts highlighting network changes and analysing accurately the impact of business trajectories modifications.

UDPP Scope and Triggering Conditions The nature of UDPP is yet to be clarified. What can be concluded from the exercise is that, at least in the situations simulated (i.e., medium severity imbalances, no delays exceeding 20 minutes, no need to cancel flights), the airspace users did not see the potential gain of triggering an “overall negotiation process”. The possibility to decide individually for each flight how to manage the arrival delay combined with the availability of a slot-swap function (usable at the level of an alliance, for example) and applied to a default TTA allocation process provided by ATM seemed to respond to airspace users’ business needs;

Therefore, UDPP application should be reserved for severe situations. No consensus was reached about who should initiate the UDPP process. Most of the experts think that the initiator of the process would depend on the type of situation.

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TTA Allocation Strategies Three basic strategies can be identified impacting the way flights in the planning and execution phases are merged in dynamic DCB arrival sequences. Depending on the severity of the situation addressed and the reliability of the predictions (both in terms of demand and capacity) one of the strategies should be selected in order to achieve an optimum balance between airborne and ground delays.

2. Exploration of validation techniques Gaming technique At this stage of maturity of the concept (lifecycle phase V1 in the E-OCVM) it is inadequate to address all elements in the Gaming experiment uniquely through real-time simulation. Detailed procedures are not yet precisely defined and the platform obviously cannot include mature models of SESAR IP2 systems or planning working positions. Therefore, running real-time sessions provides limited outcomes in terms of concept clarification or operability. Real-time sessions are however interesting to capture the temporal aspects of the designed processes such as:

• The duration of CDM processes;

• The continuous refinement of the network operation plans and real-time network monitoring tasks;

• The study of the temporal transition between DCB and AMAN processes;

The organisation of WP3.3.2 gaming sessions revealed that a good approach at this stage was to mix two types of sessions:

• Interactive brainstorming sessions using the simulator as a concrete support to discuss the different steps of an operational scenario;

• “Pseudo” real-time simulations to capture the temporal aspects.

The experts involved in the Gaming experiment considered that it was very useful for concept clarification and refinement, and for the identification of issues related to concept implementation. The experiment also allowed the identification of issues related to the use of the technique for the purpose of low maturity concept refinement:

• The designed processes and procedures are very far from the current ones. Therefore, a significant training period is required for the gaming actors to understand fully the impact of those new procedures and concept elements;

• Gaming participants tend to reproduce current practices through different processes and procedures;

• Gaming participants tend to focus on detailed system requirements (e.g., queuing algorithms, graphical representations) rather than on general concept refinement;

• Some of the findings may be very dependant on the models implemented in the platform.

The DARTIS platform in support the gaming exercise can be viewed as one of the main outcomes of the experiment as it may provide support to SESAR validation activities. Although DARTIS cannot be considered yet as mature, the platform offers potentially very interesting and unique features such as:

• The simulation of different interacting planning processes operating at network level and addressing en-route and/or airport arrival congestion;

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• The simulation of different processes operating at different time horizons in either the short-term planning or execution phases;

• The realistic simulation of the continuous update of the traffic demand as the simulation can be fed with actual plans, plan messages and traffic events occurring throughout a day;

• DARTIS could be used in the context of shadow mode on-site simulations and even live-trials.

Process simulation The Process Simulation validation technique was used to study different TTA allocation strategies and their impact on the negotiation of business trajectories.

From a general point of view, this technique can be viewed as an advanced model-based technique focusing on the interaction between processes. It is obviously complementary to the Gaming technique as it enables the generation of quantitative elements in support of concept clarification and possibly, at a later stage, operability assessment.

The experiment demonstrated the ability of PROMAS to perform the modelling of a large range of ATM processes in a very short time frame. Therefore it is a promising platform to be used, and particularly in the context of rapid prototyping activities.

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14 ANNEX VI - SUMMARY OF THE SIMULATION REPORT ON AIRSPACE ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT (D3.3.3-02)

WP3.3.3 Airspace Organization and Management WP Leader Aena

Purpose

The main objectives of EP3 WP3.3.3 are:

• Clarification of the concept in terms of collaborative planning focused on the short term phase and the end of the medium term phase (from one day to some hours before the operation): Advance Flexible Use of Airspace AFUA concept and Collaborative Decision Making CDM processes;

• Assessment of process feasibility when Airspace Reservations are changed by military users when considering the dynamic diverse airspace use (AFUA concept). The civil users must adapt their trajectories to best fit their preferences;

• Exploration the techniques and supporting tools needed to achieve an airspace organization and management efficiently adapted to changing demand considering civilian and military requests;

• Assessment of alternative validation techniques suited to these early stages of concept validation.

SESAR ASPECTS

The Exercise address to main aspects of the SESAR ConOps:

• Dynamic diverse airspace use (AFUA concept)

o The Flexible Use of Airspace (FUA) process is improved with more dynamic airspace management enabling dynamic responses to short notice military airspace requirements e.g. up to 3 hours before operations or very short term changes e.g. bad weather;

o Real-time coordination to design, allocate, open and close military airspace structures on the day of operations i.e. short term phase;

o Clarification on the definition of the roles and responsibilities of all actors involved in the exercise: Civil/Military Airspace Users, Civil/Military Airspace Managers and Sub-Regional Manager.

• Agreement of the Business / Mission Trajectories through CDM when military changes its airspace reservation.

o Airspace users can refine the Shared Business / Mission Trajectory (SBT) taking into account constraints arising from new and more accurate information. They access to an up-to-date picture of the traffic situation with the level of detail required for planning including e.g. historical data, forecasted data, already known intentions, MET forecast, current traffic, ASM situation.

Hypothesis

The DCB Negotiation Processes at local/sub-regional level between Civil/Military Airspace Users, Civil/Military Airspace Manager and the Sub-Regional Manager when a change of airspace reservation by military is produced will be operational feasible.

Main measures

• Process feasibility: extracting and analysing information from questionnaires and debriefing sessions generated during the gaming sessions.

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• Gaming as a validation technique: extracting and analysing information from the dedicated questionnaires filled in by the participants during the gaming sessions to assess the technique for validation concept purpose.

Validation Objectives The validation activity aimed at gaining insight into the interactions of the different involved actors and the information needed to support the decision making processes when any change in the military airspace requirements occurs from the end of medium-term phase to the short-term phase.

The four objectives of the exercise are described in the following paragraphs.

1. Clarification on the SESAR Concept The exercise aimed at clarifying the SESAR Concept in terms of collaborative planning processes focused at short-term phase and partially medium term phase i.e. from one day to some hours before the operation when there is a change in military airspace reservation (a new airspace requirement and an exercise cancelation).

The exercise aimed at clarifying the SESAR Concept in the following aspects:

• Advanced Flexible Use of Airspace (AFUA concept), particularly:

o Flexible Military Airspace Structures: The possibility for ad-hoc structure delineation at short notice is offered to respond to short-term military users' requirements not covered by pre-defined structures and/or scenarios. A VGA (Variable Geometry Area) has been analysed in the gaming to clarify the operational feasibility of the related processes when one is implemented at short notice.

o Enhanced Real-time Civil-Military Coordination of Airspace Utilisation: Real-time coordination is further enhanced through what-if functionalities and automated support to airspace booking and airspace management (e.g. integrated toolset allowing AMC and other parties to design, allocate, open and close military airspace structures on the day of operations).

• Agreement of the Business / Mission Trajectories through collaborative flight planning:

o DCB Negotiation Processes that occur at local/sub-regional level i.e. FAB among Civil & Military Airspace Users, Civil & Military Airspace Managers and the Sub-Regional Manager when there is a change in military airspace reservation.

These aspects of the SESAR Concept have not reached the level of maturity required to justify a performance assessment. That is why, the exercise provided only a qualitative assessment and concentrated on an operational feasibility assessment including:

• Definition of the steps in the CDM processes that are triggered;

• Coordination that takes place to find the best airspace solution when a military reservation is requested at short notice;

• Roles and responsibilities.

2. Assessment of the process feasibility The second objective was to assess the process feasibility when military users change the location or timescale of a reserved area considering the dynamic diverse airspace use (AFUA concept).

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When this occurs, the Civil/Military Airspace Manager along with the Sub-Regional Manager have to provide the most suitable airspace configuration considering both civil and military needs. Through the design of different scenarios, the different alternative processes were assessed.

3. Exploration of supporting tools The third objective was to explore the supporting tools needed to achieve an airspace organization efficiently adapted to a changing demand considering civilian and military requests.

The exercise analyzed the potential functionalities of the what-if tool for airspace organization which will support the decisions of Airspace Managers and Sub-Regional Manager, providing the most suitable airspace configurations. In addition, several requirements for the supporting tools for the rest of roles involved in the processes were identified.

4. Assessment of new validation techniques Finally the exercise assessed innovative validation techniques suited to these early stages of concept validation e.g. the Human-in-the-loop-gaming techniques.

Gaming techniques were originally used for military strategy purposes; today they have been adopted and enhanced for validation of operational feasibility.

Airspace Information The operational context for the validation activities corresponds to a FAB due to the scope of the exercise objective, local/sub-regional level at airspace level.

The selected operational context was the Spain-Portugal FAB. However, the exercise did not consider the entire FAB, but concentrated on the continental area over Spain and Portugal.

Figure 14: Spanish-Portugal FAB

Modular Sectorisation Adapted to Variations in Traffic Flows: Airspace is apportioned to small elementary sectors or modules. Modules are grouped in control sectors according to grouping principles and pre-defined configuration scenarios.

In this gaming exercise, the small elementary volumes were the current existing ones of Spain and Portugal control sectors. Combination of these elements provided the predefined airspace configurations and was defined during the exercise modelling activities (preparatory activities).

Flexible Military Airspace Structures/ Variable Geometry Area (VGA) is applied to have an area (TSA or TRA) which is the core of the segregated airspace considered, and to have several pre-planned possible extensions (lobes) next to it which would be activated and

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utilized by the Military according to the size of the training requested. This core part of the segregated airspace will be newly created in the future SESAR context. The possibility for ad-hoc structure delineation at short notice is offered to respond to short-term airspace users' requirements not covered by pre-defined structures and/or scenarios.

The OS-34 proposes a VGA whose core area is a circle and two possible lobes. However, during the gaming sessions, it was highlighted that the VGA shape is not necessarily a round core area with two additional extensions in the form of lobes. These possible extensions can be required in a different time frame (for example the last ten minutes of the mission).

Figure 15: Proposed VGA shape from OS-34

These kinds of areas allow planning day to day exercises where:

• Military activities are planned the day before the operations or even the same day;

• Airspace needs are coordinated at the end of the medium term planning phase;

• Tactical changes are established through CDM sessions.

Traffic Information The traffic sample used as the reference in EP3 WP3.3.3 is based on the traffic provided by EUROCONTROL for the simulation exercises run within T231 in SESAR Definition Phase. This traffic is built through the increment of a reference traffic corresponding to the 19th of July 2005.

Simulation Scenarios Two main processes have been analysed:

• Simulation Scenario #1 Location and Refinement of a VGA: The Exercise Director requests an airspace reservation (particularly a VGA) to perform a mission the following day. The simulation scenario time span covers from the day before up to some hours before the operation. During this period, the location and refinement of the dimension (size, shape, and timing slots) of this ad hoc structure are performed in an iterative collaborative way between the different users (civilian and military) up to some hours before the activation of the area. The business trajectories are agreed and adapted by considering the airspace military needs along with the surrounding airspace to safely and efficiently handle the users’ trajectories.

• Simulation Scenario #2 Cancelation of a VGA: Due to bad weather conditions, the Exercise Director cancels the exercise and releases the airspace reservation. The process is finished when the new agreed user’s trajectories do not provoke a capacity imbalance in the airspace. The simulation scenario runs from some hours before the supposed activation of the VGA.

The following figure shows the story board of the Simulation Scenarios from the day before the operation to some hours before. The blue boxes reflect the main milestones from the day before the operation to the supposed activation of the VGA. The white boxes represent a collaborative process between different actors to accomplish with the milestones.

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SBR/AMC notifies the final set of

trajectories and the associated

airspace configuration.

SBR/AMC defines the

suitable locations of the VGA and

the airspace configurations

Exercise Director notifies

the airspace needs and the

flexibility

Exercise Director

Simulation Scenario #1: LOCATION of a VGA

MIL ASMCIVIL ASM

Sub-Regional Manager

Civil User #1Civil User #2

Exercise Director


MIL ASMCIVIL ASM

Simulation Scenario #1: REFINEMENT of a VGA

MIL ASMCIVIL ASM



Exercise Director

MIL ASMCIVIL ASM


Exercise Director cancels the exercise due to bad weather

conditions

Exercise Director

Simulation Scenario #2: CANCELATION of a VGA

MIL ASMCIVIL ASM



AirlineCoordinator

AirlineCoordinator

AirlineCoordinator

Day before operation Day D-hours

Publicationin the NOP

Figure 16: Story Board of the Simulation Scenarios: Location, Refinement and Cancelation of a VGA

Actors The actors that participated during the gaming sessions included:

• Civil Users (Airline Coordinator Centres) are the trajectory owners. They hold all the information related to their trajectories and contained in the NOP;

• Exercise Director (Military Users) is responsible for scheduling the military exercise and to coordinate with airspace managers (AMC) the military needs in terms of airspace reservation and time slot at any time;

• Civil/Military Airspace Managers (AMC): both together represent the Airspace Management Cell established at FAB level and staffed with civil and military personnel responsible for ASM. The AMC collects airspace allocation requests following proper consideration of civil and military users needs, promulgates its decisions regarding the activation/deactivation of manageable airspace under its jurisdiction via the NOP;

• Sub-Regional Manager assures the stability and efficiency of the ATM Network on the sub-regional level, typically a FAB. According to the Experts involved in EP3 WP3.3.1 sessions, and during the gaming sessions, it was decided that at FAB level, the functions developed by the Airspace Manager and the Sub-Regional Manager should be merged in one role;

• Airline Coordinator: this is a new role identified during the gaming sessions.

Validation Technique: Gaming In order to achieve the objectives of the exercise, the negotiation processes at FAB level, between civil and military users, civil/military airspace managers and Sub-Regional manager, and their responsibilities, were reproduced during the gaming sessions in order to determine whether the processes were feasible or not. The final goal consisted of assessing the operational feasibility of the simulated processes.

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Gaming is essentially human in the loop activity applicable to simulate strategic decision making processes. The gaming technique allows to run scenarios in real-time (or even slow time) for the decision process and is used to promote original thinking, thus enabling out-of-the-box thinking. In the context of this exercise, the game was organized and conducted by a game manager. A set of winning conditions were defined. Some were public while each participant’s winning conditions were private. This facilitated the anticipated conflicts between public knowledge on ATM system performance premises and the individual airspace user competitive strategy.

The gaming technique was used to provide insight into the interactions of the actors and the required information to support the decision making processes when an unexpected event affects the airspace management in the area. In particular, three gaming sessions were conducted:

• The first gaming session was carried out through the gaming technique based on papers without any hardware or software supporting the game;

• The final two gaming sessions were performed on a dedicated software gaming platform i.e. CHILL. The Airspace Management Cell and the Sub-Regional Manager were supported by a second CHILL platform operating as a what-if tool, thus providing the possibility to analyze alternatives before publishing in the NOP the final proposal e.g. the most suitable airspace configuration and sharing this information with the rest of the gamers. CHILL platform was adapted according to the gaming requirements e.g. rules, roles and responsibilities, processes and interactions between actors.

A set of different methods were applied for analyzing the operational feasibility of the CDM processes simulated during the gaming sessions. With the final objective of collecting as much information as possible, these methods consisted of a combination of:

• Structured questionnaires: designed on purpose and used during the three gaming sessions for two main objectives:

o Questionnaires on the concept addressed: tailored for each game and for each role playing in the game. They had a specific relevance during the debriefing sessions which took place at the end of each game since the collected answers were discussed by all participants, identifying agreed conclusions, disagreements or open issues.

o Questionnaires on the Gaming Technique: Distributed before and after each gaming session, these questionnaires collected the participants’ initial expectations and final feedback on gaming as a validation technique for concept clarification purposes.

• Communications between actors during gaming sessions: all communications between the different roles playing during the games were collected and/or recorded and, at the end of each game, analyzed during the debriefing sessions.

Results Next the main results obtained from the gaming sessions are summarized per validation objective:

1. Clarification on the AFUA concept Several gaming sessions were carried out to obtain clarification on the following aspects of the concept.

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Definition of roles and responsibilities

From the first gaming sessions, the need of a new role/function, named Airline Coordinator, representing airspace users’ interests was detected. The main roles and responsibilities of the Airline Coordinator were agreed by the participants and consolidated in the following statements:

• The Airline Coordinator represents the civil airspace users’ interests into the ATM System and deals with their problems;

o It is a function that does not occupy a hierarchical position over the users but it is a supporting role both for the Sub-Regional Manager and the airspace users;

o It is always aware of the process and intervenes when necessary taking part of the decision only if the problem cannot be solved through direct negotiation between airspace users, Sub-Regional Manager and Airspace Management Cell e.g. considerable number of airspace users are affected by a sudden change in the military airspace reservation;

o It works in close coordination with the Sub-Regional Manager to identify the best solution (equitable, suitable and feasible) for airspace users;

o It is a facilitator that ensures the communication and explanation of the decisions taken by the Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell for maintaining e.g. capacity and safety levels;

o It analyzes with the Sub-Regional Manager other possible solutions in terms of flow management before triggering a Demand and Capacity Balancing (DCB) measure;

o It is a facilitator of the User Driven Prioritization Process (UDPP) for airspace users;

o It contacts civil airspace users in real time to know their particular preferences.

• The Civil Users are key actors involved during the military airspace reservation process. They will convey to the Airline Coordinator their interests and priorities. The selection of the preferred trajectories and the least penalising SBT distortions is done maximizing the Operational Quality Indicator. This indicator is a combination of the following factors:

o Passenger Quality Indicator: quality of service provided to the passenger directly related to the airport delays, loss of connections and affected passengers;

o Operating Cost Indicator: factors associated to the company cost such as extra-flight time, extra fuel consumption, crew activity, airport taxes i.e. night curfews, aircraft capacity, flight priorities, etc.

• The Exercise Director is the leader authority for all military units involved in the exercise. She/he will collaborate to find suitable solutions to impact civil users to a minimum during all the process offering greater flexibility (if possible);

• The Airspace and Sub-Regional Managers work in close coordination with the Airline Coordinator in case a considerable number of civil users are affected to find the best solution (equitable, suitable and feasible) for airspace users. The Sub-Regional Manager is the final responsible to accept the new proposed trajectories with the support of the Airline Coordinator (when this role is necessary) or with the civil users. In order to detect the most suitable airspace organization, evaluate the Cost of Solution Indicator. This indicator is a combination of the following factors:

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o Equitable criteria: Minimum number of affected trajectories, historic information at FAB level, minimum trajectories distortion e.g. extra flight time and extra fuel consumption;

o Demand and Capacity balance among sectors i.e. standard deviation;

o Traffic Complexity Indicator;

o Traffic Complexity Balance Indicator;

o Total Traffic Complexity Indicator.

Criteria for location, delineation and dimension of a Variable Geometry Area

The exercise identified criteria for the location, delineation and dimension of ad-hoc airspace structures at short notice i.e. Variable Geometry Area (VGA) to respond to short-term military users’ requirements not covered by pre-defined structures and/or scenarios.

The principle of the VGA is to have an area which is the core of the segregated airspace considered, and to have several pre-planned possible extensions/lobes next to it which would be activated and utilized by the Military airspace users according to the size of the training requested and to the traffic in the area at the time. This revolutionary approach instead of currently existing fixed areas provides a greater flexibility to military for airspace reservation.

When a military area is reserved, priorities at State level or FAB level will be defined in advance at strategic level to ensure the success of the process. The Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell will be responsible for deciding the use of airspace between civil and military airspace users. Equity Indicators will be considered for guaranteeing the equitable access to the shared airspace. Today the ‘Ratio of Military Requests effectively accomplished’ along with the number of affected civil flights are the main factors to be considered for military airspace locations.

Regarding the civil airspace users’ impact, the main criterion to locate the VGA is to impact civil air traffic to a minimum. Based on this basic principle, several indicators were identified, consolidated and agreed during the gaming sessions:

• Minimum Number of affected SBTs;

• Minimum Number of times that same civil users have been affected (historic information at FAB Level): for equity reasons, the impact on every individual user should be calculated in advance and after the operation. This information should be stored to obtain historic data and to identify when a company has been punished and therefore, to take into consideration this information to assign an equitable share use of airspace;

• Operational Quality Indicator: It will be evaluated by civil airspace users or the Airline Coordinator (when this role is necessary);

• Cost of Solution Indicator: It will be evaluated by the Airspace and Sub-Regional Managers.

According to these criteria, the final solution is obtained as an iterative process with several loops. The figure below reflects one loop of the process to find the most suitable VGA location, set of trajectories and airspace organization. The negotiation with military for selecting a set of possible VGA locations is not shown in this figure.

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Figure 17: Share Use of airspace is conflicting with Capacity

According to the qualitative objectives associated to ‘Access and Equity’ KPA, where shared use is conflicting with other performance expectations, such as capacity, viable airspace alternatives will be provided to satisfy the airspace users’ business need, in consultation with all affected stakeholders. For priority management, more options will be available than just the ‘first come first serve’ rule.

When the shared use of airspace is conflicting with capacity, the Sub-Regional Manager and Airspace Management Cell inform the civil airspace users and the Airline Coordinator about the global capacity restriction. The civil airspace users supported by the Airline Coordinator decide:

• Who are allowed to fly their preferred trajectories;

• For those who are not allowed due to the capacity constraint, how to change their preferred trajectories based on their own business model.

The Airline Coordinator function ensures the equity between the civil airspace users. To perform this responsibility, the Airline Coordinator should handle specific information to guarantee that the civil airspace users’ access to the airspace is equitable, even when there is a conflict with capacity. In any case, it should be noted that the final responsible for checking if the new set of trajectories proposed by the users met the capacity constraint are the Sub-Regional Manager and Airspace Management Cell with the support of the Airline Coordinator.

The Airline Coordinator needs at least the following set of indicators, identified during the gaming sessions, for guaranteeing the equitable access to airspace between civil airspace users:

• Historical Reasons (for every civil airspace user):

o Number of times that each civil airspace user preferred trajectories have been affected at FAB level due to military airspace reservations. This information could be calculated for seasons;

o Degree of trajectory distortions: Every civil airspace user would have a ‘bucket of admissible distortions’. If this ‘bucket’ has been already filled in at any time, no more distortions can be assigned during the rest of the season. The maximum admissible level of this indicator would be weighted depending on factors such as the civil airspace user type e.g. commercial, low cost, business airlines, the airspace location e.g. high, medium or low density areas, etc.

• Operational Quality Indicator providing the trajectory distortions for the day of operations;

• Flight priorities that would lead to special treatment e.g. State flights;

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• Number of affected trajectories.

The gaming participants agreed that the historical indicators which may imply high detailed information from every civil airspace user should be handled just by the Airline Coordinator. Meanwhile the Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell should cope just with high level equity indicators such as extra flight time, extra flight miles or flight priorities.

Finally, it should be highlighted that Boundary Conditions such as equipment, environment, safety, or ready to be used i.e. operation timeframe will have an impact on the access to shared airspace and on the priorities set up.

Use of Capacity Opportunities

The gaming sessions also analyzed the use of capacity opportunities when military cancels a planned exercise. In particular, the conditions for cancellation of a military exercise and how and in which circumstances the civil users may take advantage of the released airspace were analyzed.

The probability of cancellation is higher for day-to-day exercises than for major exercises. The cancelation of a major exercise is normally due to very bad weather conditions and may not be total, just partial, due to its big impact on the military activities. But, if a major exercise is cancelled, the airspace released and extra capacity is bigger, since the major exercises are planned in advance and usually need more airspace.

In general, most of civil airspace users would like to take advantage of a released airspace if they were originally affected, and therefore would like to fly their initial preferred trajectories. But this decision is dependent on the timeframe that means the time available to manage the change of trajectories: on an average basis they need at least two hours before the Estimated Off-Block Time (EOBT). If the release airspace information is published very close to the operation, the civil airspace users may not consider the capacity opportunities.

For instance, the already loaded fuel may affect on the decision. The general strategy of a company is to leave on time and get the destination in the quickest way. If the flight time is reduced enough due to a military airspace release, then part of the fuel is not needed anymore and it is necessary to unload it for landing safely at the airport destination. This could imply a cost in term of time and money that would make uninteresting the use of the released airspace.

2. Assessment of the process feasibility The gaming sessions to assess the process feasibility have been focused on the location and refinement of a VGA in a collaborative way between the different actors from the day before the operation up to some hours before the activation of the area.

When military airspace users decide to perform a mission during the following day, it is necessary to find the most suitable location, dimension and time slot while guaranteeing the impact on civil users to a minimum. Different alternatives of the process i.e. sequence of steps and actors’ involvements were tested in order to evaluate which one was the most suitable. The conclusions obtained from a particular alternative were used to feed and design the following one. In this way, the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative found in every gaming session were refined in the next session.

The main proposed alternatives for the process were:

• If the Airline Coordinator was needed or not;

• If the process was ‘sequential’ or ‘parallel’ basically meaning the timeframe when the civil airspace users or the Airline Coordinator were involved in the process;

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Figure 19: ‘Parallel’ Process

• If the Airline Coordinator was the only airspace civil users’ representative in the process or they had direct access to the negotiation process.

The ideal process would consist of an intermediate process between a ‘parallel’ and a ‘sequential’ one:

• The communication with the civil airspace users would be possible during all the process, but the responsible for the final solution would be the Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell;

• The Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell should take into consideration the airspace users’ preferences from the beginning to decide collaboratively the best solutions for all. If the civil airspace users’ preferences were not initially compliant with the airspace capacity constraints, the Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell would try to find solutions to consider users proposals imposing restrictions on the trajectories for the preferred VGA location but guaranteeing the equity;

• The Airline Coordinator should always be aware of the negotiation process, but only intervene if the problem cannot be solved through direct negotiation between the civil airspace users and the Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell;

• The Exercise Director should be kept in the loop up to the end of the planning phase since the involvement of this role is beneficial for the process. Even though the Exercise Director has taken part in the process leading to the definition of the VGA, this does not imply that the previous agreement is ‘carved on stone’. The Exercise Director may add new flexibility on the military requirements supporting the process to finally identify the best possible solution minimizing the impact caused by the

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reservation on the civil airspace users while allowing military users to perform their planned exercise;

• The criteria for selecting the best location of the VGA will be based on the number of affected trajectories, the cost of solution indicator and previously agreed airspace users’ indicators along with equitable and accessible indicators.

3. Exploration of supporting tools One specific gaming session was performed to analyze and identify the potential functionalities of the what-if tool for airspace organization and management that should support the Civil and Military Airspace Mangers and Sub-Regional Managers decisions for providing the most suitable airspace configurations.

Moreover, during all the gaming sessions, it was highlighted the importance of the automation of the process to enable dynamic responses to design, allocate, open and close military airspace structures. Therefore, several requirements for the supporting tools of all the roles involved in the processes were gathered during all sessions.

Definition of the What-If Tool Capabilities

The what-if tool supports Civil and Military Managers and Sub-Regional Manager decisions:

• To evaluate a set of possible solutions related to the most appropriate orientation of the VGA under given traffic conditions according to an agreed ‘cost of solution’ indicator; and

• To provide the most suitable airspace organization associated to each possible VGA location by: considering the user preferences and military airspace reservations, ranking them according to a cost of solution, ensuring the demand/capacity balance on both number of movements and traffic complexity measurement, and assessing the impact at FAB level.

The figure below shows the information flows in the what-if tool, including the inputs from other actors involved in the process.

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Figure 20: What-if tool

The What-If tool works in an iterative way with several loops until the final decision is agreed. For each possible VGA location and taking into account estimated trajectories, the What-If tool calculates the ‘Cost of Solution’ Indicator.

Definition of the Supporting Tools Functionalities

As mentioned before, during all gaming sessions, it was stated that all actors involved in the design, allocation, opening and close of any military airspace structure should be supported by tools automating the process as much as possible. These supporting tools should comply with the following requirements:

• Information sharing and the transparency on data are key stones. The quantity and quality of information shared by all actors affected by the military airspace reservation e.g. users’ preferences, proposed solutions, options and capacity constraints for negotiation, etc., determine the suitability of the reached solution. Therefore, there is a need of a tool for publishing and sharing information during the negotiation process in order to guarantee transparency of the shared data and to provide a common basis for the negotiation. Thus all the actors/roles have the same reliable and updated information in real-time. This tool/functionality must be accessed via SWIM. It is important to note that the NOP cannot be used with this purpose since it is only updated when an agreement is reached;

• A standard supporting tool for civil airspace users need to be agreed, developed and made available to the ATM community. The supporting tool needs to be configurable, so each civil airspace user could customize it depending on its business model. For those users who cannot afford to invest on tools, an access via

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SWIM to the standard supporting tool could be enabled so they could tune it according to their business model;

• The supporting tool in the hands of the Airline Coordinator need to be connected to all the civil airspace users’ supporting tools since they consider their different business models;

• The supporting tools for all actors/roles must be equipped with customizable alarms that alert them about changes affecting the progress of the negotiation e.g. new information sharing, changes in the NOP.

In addition, the supporting tool for the Civil Airspace Users and the Airline Coordinator needs to calculate, for each possible VGA location, the ‘Operational Quality’ Indicator.

4. Assessment of new validation techniques During this validation exercise, two alternatives of gaming techniques were tested: gaming based on ‘papers/cards’ and gaming based on a dedicated software platform.

The first sessions performed just using ‘papers/cards’ were focused on getting familiar with the gaming technique and supporting the design of the most appropriate processes for the following gaming sessions to be conducted with the software platform. The conclusions obtained from these sessions were surprisingly constructive and with very cost effective means some key topics were already identified.

During the last two sets of gaming sessions, the use of a dedicated software platform provided an added value, due to the fact that the platform provides realism to the scenarios, makes easier to understand the roles and responsibilities facilitating the detection of supporting tools capabilities, offers quantitative indicators in real-time and supports the decision making at every step of the process. Moreover, it provides an area for real-time information sharing, stores the communications and all the changes done on the scenarios during the sessions and makes them available to be analyzed in depth later on. Therefore, the results confidence was improved using a dedicated software platform, although the use of ‘papers’ was very useful to define the objectives and scenarios of these sessions.

Taking into account these results, it can be stated that at early stages of the concept maturity, the gaming technique could be used as a support for clarification of concepts and processes as well as for the identification of tool requirements and capabilities. However, the definition of the session scope needs to be very precise. This technique is not useful to explore a full concept but delimited concept ‘pieces’, being necessary to stress on the objectives that are intended to be addressed.

Furthermore, from the participants’ point of view, the use of this technique to support Expert Judgment for concept clarification was found extremely positive. The conclusions obtained from an expert group would be more solid if the process is played than if they are only based on discussions and theoretical ideas.

Conclusions 1. The ideal process to design, allocate, open and close ad-hoc military airspace

structures would consist of an intermediate process between a ‘parallel’ and a ‘sequential’ one. The figure below reflects this optimal collaborative process, taking into account that the final solution is obtained through an iterative process with several loops:

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Figure 21: Optimal Process

The dimension and location of a military airspace reservation is a process where not only the Exercise Director and the Airspace Managers are the involved actors but also the civilian part are a key active part of the collaborative process.

In this way, the Exercise Director will intervene during all the process, willing to offer greater flexibility, if necessary, to impact civil users to a minimum. Particularly, when the civilian access intention interferes with capacity, the first step to do is to request military the possibility of flexibility in location, dimension or timing slots in order to smooth the impact.

2. Regarding refinement of roles and responsibilities, a new role/function, named Airline Coordinator, representing airspace users’ interests was detected. It should always be aware of the negotiation process, ensuring the transparency of process for users and that the users’ preferences are taken into consideration. The new role/function only intervenes in the process flow if the problem cannot be solved through direct negotiation between the civil airspace users and the Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell (e.g. a considerable number of users are affected).

The Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell will be responsible for deciding the use of airspace between civil and military airspace users. Equity Indicators will be considered for guaranteeing the equitable access to the shared airspace. Cost of Solution Indicators will allow Sub-Regional Manager and the Airspace Management Cell to select the most appropriate airspace configuration in order to maintain the performance levels targets (essentially capacity and efficiency levels). The information needed for calculating these indicators includes historic data, workload, capacity, etc.

In addition, and with the equity as the final goal, the Airspace Users and the Airline Coordinator will work with the Operational Quality Indicator which is a combination of the Passenger Quality and Operating Cost factors.

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If there is an unexpected airspace release by the military users and is published very close to the operation, the civil airspace users may not consider the capacity opportunity.

3. Related to needed enablers to support the process, all actors involved in the negotiation processes should be supported by automation tools which guarantee the information sharing and its transparency. Real-time coordination is further enhanced through what-if functionalities and automated support. These supporting tools will be configurable and will be equipped with customizable alarms to alert actors/roles about changes affecting the progress of the negotiation.

4. Finally, Gaming technique is proven as applicable and useful for validation purposes at early stages of the concept maturity. It can be used in combination with other techniques e.g. expert groups or modelling for clarification of concepts and processes as well as for the identification of tool requirements and capabilities and initial performance assessments.

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15 ANNEX VII - SUMMARY OF THE SIMULATION REPORT ON COLLABORATIVE AIRPORT PLANNING (D3.3.4-02)

WP3.3.4 – Collaborative Airport Planning WP Leader DLR

Purpose The goal of the gaming exercise was to analyse and evaluate the collaborative planning process and to get some insights into possible elements of the Airport Operations Centre (APOC). The exercise also looked at the usefulness of gaming supported by simulation as a validation tool for advanced operational concepts related to pre-tactical planning. Conduct of the experiment consisted of an Airport Gaming exercise to assess the concept and a Network Modelling exercise to feed Gaming.

SESAR Aspects

Collaborative Airport Planning shall allow all stakeholders at an airport to manage airport operations considering the goals and constraints of all partners. This is expected to provide solutions that make the best overall use of available resources and generate a win win situation for all participants. The stakeholders will work together supported by planning tools to constantly refine the Airport Operations Plan (AOP) and adapting it to unforeseen events or disruptions.

Hypothesis Main hypotheses for Gaming were:

• H1: Sharing all relevant data within the AOP ensures a high level of situational awareness of the involved stakeholders.

• H2: Collaborative airport planning allows stakeholders to agree on a set of performance parameters for the airport to deal with a forecast problem situation.

Main hypotheses for Network Modelling were:

• H1: The Kernel Network of Europe represents the behaviour of network constraining decision making in a sufficiently realistic way to provide a realistic context of network-wide operations for the APOC and its decision making at airport level.

• H2: The constraining conditions of the Kernel Network are providing appropriate guidance to the Gaming exercise, which can be used in an effective way to keep delays to an acceptable minimum throughout the Network.

Main measures

The gaming exercise has succeeded in providing evidence that collaborative airport planning is viable. In addition, it was found that a common situation overview (powerwall) is beneficial for the negotiation process, whilst a centralized APOC allowing face-to-face communication will also have positive effects.

The network management activity succeeded in providing a model sufficiently accurate to generate data that may be used in the airport collaborative planning process. The actual use of these network data in the planning process could however not be demonstrated within the scope of the exercise. It is seen as a highly interesting topic for future research to investigate the coupling of a real-time capable network analysis model with the collaborative planning at the airport level in a combined exercise.

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Simulation Objectives Main objective of the exercise was to study the collaborative planning process in an Airport Operations Centre, and specifically:

1. Evaluate a workflow model of the decision process;

2. Examine the role of a moderator to support the decision making process;

3. Given the APOC and given a realistic scenario demanding a commonly reached pre-tactical decision:

• Determine how actors reach a decision in the APOC;

• Demonstrate and investigate a prototype planning support tool.

A second objective was to assess the effects of this decision making on the airspace network surrounding the example airport. This objective was addressed by the network modelling part of the exercise.

Finally, experience in the use of gaming techniques was to be gained from the exercise. This experience will be valuable in further validation of the SESAR operational concept.

Airspace characteristics For the Gaming exercise, the airport under consideration was Hamburg airport. Hamburg has a system of two crossing runways (see Figure at the right). For the validation scenario only one runway configuration was active, using 23 for arrivals and 33 for departures.

Figure 22: Hamburg airport

For the network model a significant part of Europe was selected, including 17 major airports.

Traffic characteristics The traffic used in the gaming exercise was based on one day of real traffic data from Hamburg airport dating from 25th May 2004. The gaming exercise used a scenario from Hamburg Airport (05/25/2004). The Figure at the right shows the distribution of arrivals and departures over the day. For the exercise a time window containing the morning peak was

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used, and a predicted capacity reduction was introduced during the time of maximum traffic to create a demand/capacity imbalance to be solved by the actors in the exercise.

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The Modelling experiment used a selected scenario comprising a full ECAC-wide network of one day of operations, 24 hours, in July 2005. The selected day was a day without specific weather conditions, e.g. wind, and/or any kind of disruption. The scenario consisted of scheduled ICAO flight plans and Airport and airspace capacities. The Hamburg scenario was incorporated in the ECAC-wide scenario.

The modelling experiment compressed the ECAC-wide scenario to an aggregated Kernel Network scenario representing the network environment for the Gaming exercise of the airport of Hamburg. The most simple network configuration consisted of 81 nodes: 29 airports and 52 sectors.

Figure 24: Aggregated Kernel Network scenario

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Simulation platform The Gaming experiment was conducted in the ACCES facility of DLR in Braunschweig, which provides up to ten operator working positions as well as a large projection screen (2.2 by 5.5 metres), the so-called ‘Powerwall’. In the experiment the powerwall displayed general information about the current task, the negotiation deadline, and the current negotiation status. Furthermore, the agents’ individual proposals and their consequences on the AOP were shown (See Figure 25).

Figure 25: Powerwall design

For the gaming exercise, three operator positions (moderator, ATC agent, airline agent), one observer and one experimenter position were used. The moderator position, the Airport/ ATC, and Airline positions were placed in the first row to have a good view on the powerwall. The observer position was in the second row, to monitor the negotiation between the agents. A movable wall was positioned between the both participants (Airport/ ATC and Airline) in conditions in which face-to-face communication was not allowed. (See Figure 26.)

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Figure 26: Experimental Setting

In addition to the ACCES simulation facility used in the gaming exercise, three tools were required as tools equipment to perform the network management exercise:

• Firstly, a Network Aggregation Model was used to model the Kernel Network, representing a network around the most significant airports in Europe. This network represents the planning environment of Hamburg airport, and includes this airport.

• Secondly, a throughput analysis model was used to analyse the bottlenecks of the network. This tool was the Network Analysis Model (NAM).

• Thirdly, an Optimised Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management tool (ATFCM) was used to process optimal throughput through this network with minimal delays.

Operational Concept Gaming at airport level was based on the concept of Airport Collaborative Planning, whilst Network Modelling addressed Demand and Capacity Balancing (DCB) and Network Management and design.

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Collaborative Airport Planning:

Airport CDM is embedded in the ATM operational concept as an important enabler that will improve efficiency and punctuality. The CDM elements have been developed through airport trials and are now being implemented at many major European Airports.

Airport CDM is based on improved information sharing and data quality. It is important that the right airport partners get accurate data at the right time in the right place in order to make decisions for them while working together. This will lead to a better use of resources, partners being able to make preferences, improved punctuality and predictability.

The main objectives and benefits of the concept of Total Airport Management (TAM) are:

• Improved predictability of the behaviour of the system “airport” within the air transport network, i.e. increased prediction look-ahead-time and reduced variability of schedules compared to today, in order to give the network more time to pro-actively manage the air transport and to become more stable and robust;

• More equal performance of different airports with respect to each other, measured by one common set of performance indicators, the airport shall agree with other stakeholders and the ATFCM on a guaranteed QoS with respect to these indicators – a QoS Contract (QoSC);

• TAM shall provide ways to handle degraded situations in the most appropriate way to ensure that the QoS is fulfilled as well as possible.

In SESAR, the Network Operations Plan (NOP) is central to the concept of operations for large airports and their environment. The NOP will comprise information concerning demand, capacity and the proposed and agreed measures to balance demand and capacity. The network is specified by air traffic demand, by capacities of airports and sector network nodes. Network performance is investigated by analysing the balancing of demand and capacity through the network over the day of interest during 24 hours.

The network is considered here from the point of view of management and control on DCB and throughput analysis only. Network requirements are derived from optimised routings through sectors and airports. Network performance can be considered also from the point of view of flight performance in an airport/airspace modelled environment, but that was outside the scope of this network modelling experiment in support of Gaming.

Simulation of Scenarios and Conduct of Experiment Two operational scenarios based on the same flight plan data were used in the experiment: Case 1, addressing reduced capacity, and Case 2, addressing closed runways. In both cases the gaming started at 7:00 am and the expected capacity shortfall was made known then. Two actors played a decisive role: the Airline agent and the ATC/Airport agent.

Case 1: Reduced capacity

This scenario featured a predicted reduction in available runway capacity due to bad visibility (fog) to a value of 20 movements/hour total (arr + dep) between 08:30 and 10:00. The airline agent’s task was to make sure as many aircraft as possible are departing during this time to avoid delays later during the day from roundtrips. Specifically the number of flights departing in the time from 8:00 to 10:00 should not be less than 21 aircraft. The ATC/airport agent’s task was to make sure as few aircraft as possible are held airborne during this time. Specifically the number of flights arriving in the time from 8:00 to 10:00 should not be less than 26 aircraft and the number of arrivals delayed by more than one hour (“very late”) during the time from 08:00 to 13:00 should not exceed 7 aircraft.

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Case 2: Closed runways

This scenario featured a predicted closure of the runway system due to a heavy thunderstorm moving directly over the airfield between 09:00 and 09:45. The airline agent’s task was the same as for Case 1 and to make sure that as many aircraft as possible were departing during this time to avoid delays later during the day from roundtrips. The ATC/airport agent’s task was adapted to the Case 2 runway closure event and he had to make sure that as few aircraft as possible were held airborne during this time. Specifically the number of flights arriving in the time from 9:00 to 11:00 should not be less than 29 aircraft and the number of arrivals delayed by more than one hour (“very late”) during the time from 08:00 to 13:00 should not exceed 8 aircraft.

The conduct of the measured exercises of the Gaming experiment consisted of four sessions each, performed by two teams. Each team performed two exercises of each Case: one with and one without powerwall.

Network Management modelling

The Network Management Modelling part of the experiment was conducted separately from the Gaming exercise. The applicable scenario comprised 17 major airports in Europe, providing a representative background for constraining conditions for Hamburg flight planning departure and arrival operations. Modelling results were judged on future applicability in the context of Gaming. The Modelling experiment execution steps were:

• The selected ECAC-wide scenario was simplified to dimensions that were compliant with the scale and needs of the Gaming exercise, i.e. aggregation was applied to simplify the network to an aggregated Kernel Network.

• Validate appropriate DCB properties to make this Kernel Network applicable to constraints management in support of hub airport operations at Hamburg, i.e. the Gaming exercise.

• Generate input data for hub airports of the Kernel Network, feeding the Hamburg Gaming exercise as one of the “hub-airports” with alerting information on bottlenecks and proposed departure delays to mitigate bunching conditions in the Kernel Network.

• Two extra activities to close the loop and to support Gaming with emulated dynamic network behaviour could not be completed and were considered premature.

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Figure 27: Main airports, aggregated airport nodes and out-nodes in the route network of Europe

Simulation Results Gaming exercises

Two two-person teams participated in the gaming exercise. Consequently, the study had an explorative character and cannot easily be generalized.

The number of participants was N = 4. Therefore, most results were analysed on descriptive level. Besides, the operational realism is limited, because participants negotiated only one specific use case (Adjustment of A/D ratio) in two situations (closed runway and reduced capacity). A larger set of more realistic negotiation tasks would be necessary to evaluate the usability of the technical system and the structural conditions on the negotiation process and results. The exercises scenarios were such that there was not one best solution for all scenarios, and therefore there is no objective criterion to assess the teams’ negotiation result in these applicable cases.

The gaming exercise provided the actors with a sufficiently realistic feel so that the negotiation was taken seriously, despite the reduced scope of the scenario and only two actors being involved. Hence the results may be viewed as operationally relevant with respect to the main objective (analysing the negotiation process taking place in the APOC). The evidence provided regarding certain aspects of the negotiation process (use of powerwall, face-to-face vs. computer mediated communication) is viewed as relevant for the design of the future APOC.

Network Management modelling

A Kernel Network was constructed by applying network aggregation. Aggregation turned out to be a successful technique to simplify the ATM network, but also to make this network more robust. The model was good enough to generate delays in a more or less realistic way. However, no performance validation of the selected Kernel Network could be accomplished yet, because this requires fast-time simulation, being beyond the scope of the project.

The experiment was successful in evaluating a throughput analysis model providing information on traffic bunches at overloaded nodes of the network. Positive results were

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obtained with the Network Analysis Model (NAM), treating nodes of the network, i.e. sectors and airports, in an equivalent way from the point of view of network performance perspective. Moreover, the experiment was successful in processing 4D planning information (RBTs) in such a way that user preferences could be taken into account. The applicable optimising ATFCM model could accommodate user preferences within a stable and not highly disrupted ATM network. However, the implementation of this part of the experiment was not completed yet, which made it impossible to judge how to work with user preferences and how well the interoperability could satisfy the user needs.

In summary, it is evident that more research has to be accomplished yet to complete the interface between Gaming and a CNM/DCB model, but the preliminary results are promising. This CNM/DCB model can contribute to more realism and to more successful Gaming trials, providing a context of operations of playing the exercise that gives participants more confidence to contribute to a negotiation process in a way that represents appropriately the corresponding real-world process.

Conclusions Summarised findings are listed below for Gaming and for the Network Management model.

Gaming exercises:

• The gaming experiment succeeded in showing that a collaborative planning process supported by negotiation support tools can provide viable action plans in adverse conditions. Involving all actors in the decision increases their situation awareness, especially regarding the view of their counterparts, and also increases their commitment to achieve the planned results.

• Gaming has been demonstrated to be very useful both in concept clarification as well as validation. It provides experts a very intuitive way to grasp the consequences of a new concept and to detect weak and strong points.

Network Management model:

• The network management modelling activity succeeded in providing a useful model of the core network and to show that such a model can provide constraint data that can be used by the actors at a local airport in their decision making process.

• Network aggregation was applied to create a manageable, simplified and yet creditable model to represent a central ATM network with properties that may act with similar characteristics as a full ECAC-wide ATM network. The current modelling experiment has resulted in creating a simplified network of operations that will represent the performance of an ECAC-wide ATM network.

• 4D trajectory based planning was assumed and is mandatory for refined and reliable planning at network level. 4D planning gives the opportunity to monitor accurately the load of the total network. Constraints on planned departure operations could be processed and proposed by the network model, being provided as inputs applicable to the Gaming experiment. Also, prioritisation was evaluated as an optional facility to be used to honour user preferences agreed at airport level. However, agreed preferences can be processed successfully only if these preferences can be emulated for all airports of the network, which could not be executed yet.

• It is recommended to investigate network aggregation as a mean to provide operational robustness to central network management activities, and to develop optimising network management functionality with the objective to minimise departure and in-flight delays.

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16 ANNEX VIII - SUMMARY OF THE SIMULATION REPORT ON GLOBAL PERFORMANCES AT NETWORK-WIDE LEVEL (D3.3.5-02)

WP3.3.5 Global Performance at Network-Wide Level

Purpose

Linked to the expected impact of the OIs studied by the exercise, the high-level objectives of the experiment are the following:

• Objective 1: Study the impact on ECAC-wide behaviour and performances (especially in predictability KPA) of the implementation of OI DCB-0103 SWIM enabled NOP;

• Objective 2: Study the impact on ECAC-wide behaviour and performances (especially in capacity and efficiency KPAs) of the implementation of OI DCB-0208 Dynamic ATFCM using RBT;

• Objective 3: Study the impact on ECAC-wide behaviour and performances (especially in efficiency and predictability KPAs) of the implementation of OI DCB-0305 Network Management Function In Support of UDPP;

• Objective 4: Study synergies of the simultaneous implementation of OIs DCB-0103, DCB-0208 and DCB-0305;

• Objective 5: Perform comparative analyses of how different DCB measures impact on the performances of the network under diverse normal and degraded conditions;

• Objective 6: Study the impact on ECAC-wide behaviour and performances of the extension to ECAC network of the processes and parameters studied locally in previous EP3 WP3 validation exercises.

It must be highlighted that the main objective of the experiment is to explore the validation technique and platform used:

• Suitability for the quantification of performance benefits associated to operational concepts in an early maturity stage;

• Usability for extension to ECAC level of local validation results.

SESAR ASPECTS

EP3 WP3.3.5 focuses on those OIs promising to deliver more benefits or having a greater impact at ECAC wide level. Specifically, the OI steps addressed are:

• DCB-0103 SWIM enabled NOP; EP3 WP3.3.5 exercise assumes a fully operative SWIM environment enabling NOP common real-time situational awareness in the ECAC area. The OI is addressed by reproducing an environment where network operations are managed, optimised and synchronised as expected and un-expected events and risks unfold. Departures across the whole ECAC area are aligned with actual network conditions; taking into account constraints such as capacity and demand balancing and target time of arrival at capacity constraint airports.

• DCB-0208 Dynamic ATFCM using RBT; EP3 WP3.3.5 exercise studies how the stability of the demand and capacity situation is influenced by the ability of the individual flights to comply with CTAs and CTOs with the required performances. The uncertainty associated with flight duration and time over/ time of arrival is reduced to a minimum, and thus dynamic ATFCM scope of measures is enlarged with the use of CTA/CTOs for DCB purposes.

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• DCB-0305 Network Management Function In Support of UDPP; EP3 WP3.3.5 reproduces the situation leading to the triggering of the UDPP process for departures in various nodes of the ECAC network, and studies the impact of different prioritisation criteria in network performances, capturing any adverse network wide effects that their application may develop.

Indirectly, through the coupling, in every part of the network, of the local procedures and parameters studied in EP3 WP3.3.2 exercise, the following SESAR aspects are addressed: Queue management, Business trajectory management, Dynamic demand and capacity balancing and UDPP.

The focus is on Implementation Package 2, from 2013 to 2020.

Hypothesis

The following hypotheses lead the design of the EP3 WP3.3.5 Simulation Scenarios:

• H1: For departure and delay management, increased coordination with arrival management (taking into account constraints such as capacity and demand balancing and target time of arrival at capacity constraint airports) has a positive impact on ECAC wide predictability indicators.

• H2: Reduced uncertainty of flight duration and/or fulfilment of CTA/CTOs have a positive impact on ECAC wide capacity and efficiency indicators.

• H3: In case of severe disruptions of the network and at congested airports, the prioritisation of departure flights that have the highest number of connections and the shorter flight distances have a positive impact on ECAC wide efficiency and capacity indicators.

• H4: The network-wide simultaneous adoption of complementary DCB measures provides synergies that improve the positive impact delivered by each indicator individually (see H1, H2 and H3).

• H5: Given the same baseline conditions and the same network situation (in terms of unexpected events), different DCB measures provide distinguishable impact on global (ECAC-wide) performances, being possible their assessment in terms of provided benefits.

• H6: The application of local DCB measures, increasing the flexibility to assign the delay in case of medium severity capacity shortfall at arrivals, has an impact on ECAC wide capacity and efficiency indicators.

Main measures

Raw simulation results: sets of flown traffic after running each scenario a number of times subject to variations in the diverse random parameters for each run. (Montecarlo methods).

Data base of KPIs: obtained through post-processing of the raw measures.

Statistical analysis of KPIs: hourly distribution to obtain an approximate probability distribution of results and discard samples below the target significance level, adding the required level of confidence on data results.

Simulation Objectives Characterise the macroscopic behaviour The ATM network presents non-linear coupling of local dynamics, queuing generation and congestion propagation phenomena. The network works as diffuser of instabilities, and can either absorb or expand the causes of a local occurrence. Examples are the reactionary

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delays associated with the knock-on effect of earlier incidents, where the initial cause is no longer identifiable.

Figure 28: AT - ECAC network as a Complex System

There is not a deterministic way of characterising how a local occurrence diffuses across the network. The objective of EP3 WP3.3.5 in this sense is to be able to capture the complex and unpredictable cause-effects related to how individual actions may propagate and generate effects on other parts of the system. The question to be solved is: What is the impact of local perturbations in the overall system?

Study how local OIs impact ECAC wide performances and behaviour Local OIs applied to solve local imbalances can effectively smooth the congestion at subregional level, but also cause a propagation of the problem across the network. The objective is to capture non-linearity associated with the network, and thus to validate SESAR local Operational Improvements at a network-wide level, studying the impact of local modifications applied to solve specific imbalances on global performances.

It is not the objective of EP3 WP3.3.5 to perform an accurate tracking of roots and effects, but to provide qualitative and quantitative results of the impact of local OIs on ECAC global and macroscopic performance. The impact of local operational procedures transcends their operational level of implementation, since local areas are in the context of a highly interconnected network. The validation of an OI is not complete without the validation of its associated network effects. Furthermore, for the implementation of an OI various strategies can be adopted, each one of them having different impact on the network. EP3 WP3.3.5 has the purpose of characterising the network impact for each OI addressed, as well as to exploring possible trade-offs and synergies that may arise.

Extend the conclusions obtained at local to network level The aim is to assess the consequences of placing in the network context the validation results and conclusions obtained at a local level by previous WP3 exercises.

EP3 WP3.3.5 aim is to study the ECAC ATM network from a macroscopic point of view. In this way, EP3 WP3.3.5 and local validation exercises, with thorough level of detail, complement each other. One of EP3 WP3.3.5 objectives is to provide a network context where local conclusions can be inserted to obtain the coupled global impact. Furthermore, according to the representativeness associated with each local validation exercise, these local conclusions can be extended over the network, in order to obtain network wide validation of the implementation of local OIs.

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Cost-effective validation technique The aim is to dispose of an innovative tool suitable for the first assessment of the fitness for purpose of new concept functions in an early stage of maturity, allowing quick modifications and the simulation of a number of different configurations/operational functions in a short period of time. Both computational and execution times should be kept to a minimum. The main goal is not to obtain highly accurate ECAC performances, but to exploit the trade-off between accuracy and flexibility to be in line with the SESAR Concept lifecycle phase (V0-V1), focussing on capturing the performances evolution.

Airspace Information EP3 WP3.3.5 macroscopic approach does not consider airspace structures and their associated management. Furthermore, it is assumed “the SESAR concept will create sufficient terminal area and en-route capacity so that it is no longer a constraint in normal operations”.

Free routing is assumed to be in place for most connections between airports, and thus airports are linked by the shortest routes. “SESAR will still use sector-based operations, and route structures similar to those in use today may be deployed in order to deliver capacity in high density airspace”. Highly congested areas are considered in EP3 WP3.3.5 as additional nodes of the network with capacity restrictions. In order to obtain high density areas associated with SESAR 2020 traffic a modelling tool is used to obtain an ECAC wide airspace density map, as well as the trajectories (links between airport nodes) crossing each area.

Unitary airspace volumes are defined, and day peak aircraft density per airspace volume is calculated for each volume. High density areas are composed of aggregations of those airspace volumes with peak densities over a certain percentile. This percentile is defined in order to obtain a manageable number of high density areas. All trajectories crossing any of the airspace volume units within the high density area identified are cut by the high density node.

Traffic Information The traffic sample used as the reference in EP3 WP3.3.5 is based on the traffic provided by EUROCONTROL for the simulation exercises run within SESAR T231 in the Definition Phase. This traffic is built through the increment of a reference traffic corresponding to the 19 th of July 2005.

The traffic for 2020 is built from this 2005 scenario by applying the expected traffic growths provided by EUROCONTROL Statistics and Forecast Service (STATFOR) and the estimated modifications in the scenario for the future horizons. It is important to highlight that although one of the criteria to select the 2005 reference traffic is to avoid days with special events, during the exercise the conditions that lead to a capacity shortfall are created and it is analysed how the unexpected events affect the demand at ECAC level.

Simulation Platform The simulations were performed under the ATM-NEMMO platform, proprietary of Isdefe, performing the necessary adaptations to represent the validation environment of EP3 WP3.3.5. exercise.

ATM-NEMMO is based on the application of different techniques from the Complex Systems field (such as graph theory, diffusion analysis, and cooperative analysis) to the modelling and simulation of the ATM network. The main characteristics of the platform are:

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• Macroscopic approach;

• Modelling of different phenomena as "stochastic effects", which represent the uncertainty associated to the behaviour of certain elements of the ATM system;

• High degree of flexibility, which allows the modelling of different rules or operational improvements in an easy, cost-effective manner;

• Tractability, both in terms of computational resources and of modelling time.

The concept of "scale separation", too often disregarded in ATM modelling, is a key aspect for having models that are reliable and at the same time computationally tractable, and requires the use of adequate stochastic techniques. ATM-NEMMO allows obtaining indicative ECAC performances at network level, providing an optimum trade-off between accuracy and flexibility. The tool is modular and easy to customize so as to implement new features and to define particular details applying over a flow of aircraft or even over a single aircraft, if needed.

The model layers are:

• Heterogeneous nodes with capacity restrictions: airports and high congestion areas;

• Network topology (connections between nodes) and distance layer (link’s lengths);

• Simulations parameters: capacities, arrival/ departure ratios, aircraft performances, uncertainty of ATM system, etc.

• Local rules: how traffic flows diffuse across the network;

• Global and local variables: performance indicators (capacity, efficiency, predictability, etc.). Trends (probability distributions) of performances are obtained from repeated simulation runs, and maximum and minimum performance scenarios are characterised: "Anything that can happen will happen".

The diffusion of the traffic through the network is performed according to the ATM capacity constraints, so traffic is dynamically adapted to these constraints, according to the defined rules associated to the recreation of the ATM processes. Besides, the level of granularity of the rules can be customised from traffic flows to individual flights.

The main assumption under the modelling approach is that deterministic modelling of low level details doesn’t have a significant impact on macroscopic behaviour and performances. ATM-NEMMO incorporates the uncertainty associated to airport operations, short-term planning demand, and flight performances through stochastic effects. This uncertainty plays a major role in the generation of disruptions, especially in congested networks, being the source of small local disturbances due to the deviation from the planning of the actual execution. These local disturbances can lead to the propagation of delays across the network.

The tractability of the model makes it possible to execute a significant number of simulation runs, each one capturing the measured values of the defined metrics for every single node as well for the whole network. A single traffic sample simulated several times will produce each time different results, due to the uncertainty associated to the performances of certain ATM elements, which models the non-deterministic behaviour of the ATM system. Raw data associated to each simulation run are stored in Excel files for their later processing and analysis.

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Figure 29: Example of ATM-NEMMO G.U.I.

Simulation Scenarios EP3 WP3.3.5 Validation Scenario allows exploring the benefits of planning by taking into consideration the application of OIs (DCB-0103, DCB-0208 and DCB-0305) during the short-term planning phase. Besides, EP3 WP3.3.5 Validation Scenario contemplates the application of operational procedures and OIs (DCB-0208) related to the execution phase, and the validation of their benefits at ECAC wide level.

The simulation of the execution of the NOP is performed according to the defined baseline dynamics, the occurrence of triggers of imbalance and the dynamics associated with studied OIs. The experiment confronts, for the day of operations, planned demand and capacity, and simulates the operation according to defined dynamics and events.

Figure 30: Application of OIs related to Short-Term Planning and Execution Phases

A variety of different triggers can give rise to demand-capacity imbalances across the ATM network. Taking into account their probability of occurrence, their typical duration and size of the imbalance, EP3 WP3.3.5 Validation Scenario allows the simulation of the following situations:

• Non-Severe (No UDPP) Capacity Shortfalls impacting Multiple Nodes of the Network in the Short-Term. There are simultaneous capacity shortfalls (affecting both arrivals and departures) of diverse severity (10, 20 or 30% of capacity decrease) for a period of 3 hours each affecting three nodes of the network, two of them highly interconnected between them and the third, one of the bigger airports of the network in terms of movements per hour. The capacity shortfall can be sudden or known with 1 hour anticipation.

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• Severe (UDPP) Capacity Shortfalls impacting Multiple Nodes of the Network in the Short-Term. There are simultaneous capacity shortfalls (affecting both arrivals and departures) of diverse severity (50 or 70% of capacity decrease) anticipated 3 hours in advance affecting three nodes of the network, two of them highly interconnected between them and the third, one of the bigger airports of the network in terms of movements per hour. The duration of the capacity shortfall can be 3 or 6 hours.

Additionally, one or two en-route sectors – one belonging to the same FAB than one of the two highly interconnected nodes, and the other one belonging to the same FAB than the big airport - can experience a 3 hours non-severe capacity shortfall (30% of capacity decrease) known 1 hour in advance.

The way the different Simulation Scenarios are generated starting from the baseline scenarios can be illustrated in the form of a tree. Figure 31 shows all the explored configurations. Square boxes indicate the parameters configuration, and the implementation of OIs or links with previous WP3 exercises, while the rounded squares identify each Simulation Scenario. A Simulation Scenario is defined by all the square boxes along the relevant path.

Figure 31: Simulation Scenarios spanning tree

Results Next is included a very high level summary of EP3 WP3.3.5 results. For more information and detailed descriptions, please refer to D3.3.5-02 “Simulation Report on Global Performances at Network-Wide level”.

Characterise the macroscopic behaviour The main conclusion obtained through this Scenario is that the ATM system is very sensitive to the different levels of uncertainty. Even without any external disruption, significant modifications in the evolution of indicators can be observed when the type and quantity of uncertainty is modified. The complex, non-linear behaviour is confirmed when comparing results for SS1.2 (reduced uncertainty) and SS1.1 (high uncertainty).

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Figure 32: SS1 Departure Delay due to Internal Uncertainty

When external events occur, the system presents a non-linear response, which characterises a complex system. Although departure delays are qualitatively linked to severity and duration of capacity shortfalls, its numerical value evolves in a non-linear way. When uncertainty is higher (SS2.2, SS2.4 and SS2.6), the system is also more sensitive to capacity shortfalls, and the average departure delay grows up.

Figure 33: SS2 Arrival Delays, grouped by Level of Uncertainty

Study how local OIs impact ECAC wide performances and behaviour The following table provides a summary of the main results about implementation of the studied OIs. More details about the results and the implementation of the different OIs and the hypothesis stated can be found in the final report of EP3 WP3.3.5 exercise.

KPA

OI

Capacity Efficiency Predictability Overall

DCB-0103 – SWIM enabled NOP

There is no significant improvement in this area.

Low improvement on percentage of flights departing on time.

Lesser improvement in overall arrival delays.

Reactionary delays keep in the same range.

This OI (or at least the model implementation) as lesser significant improvements overall than expected previous to simulations.

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KPA

OI

Capacity Efficiency Predictability Overall

DCB-0208 – Dynamic ATFCM using RBT

There is a significant improvement in all tested scenarios.

It seems that this OI helps to increase effective capacity under any situation.

There is a low improvement introduced by this OI when capacity shortfall occurs.

Reactionary delays drop even a 40% under specific conditions.

This OI increases all the indicators considered in the exercise. So it seems to be a very promising improvement.

DCB-0305 – Network Management Function

The number of overloads increases. In the worst case scenario it increases to a 60%.

There is an overall improvement of 2% flights departing on time.

The number of reactionary delays keeps almost the same as the baseline scenario.

It seems that a common prioritisation criterion has no significant effect on the overall response of the network.

All OIs addressed.

DCB-0103

DCB-0208

DCB-0305

Overall capacity indicators show apparently contradictory results. While overloads increase, on the other hand the number of accommodated flights also increases.

There is an overall improvement of 4% flights departing on time.

Reactionary delays drops even for a 50% under specific conditions.

It seems that the three OIs are independent enough to improve the system in a linear way. There are no joint enhancements due to combinations of these OIs.

Table 4: Impact of Local OIs in KPAs

Extend the conclusions obtained at local level to network level Simulation Scenario 7 (SS7) focuses on how the extensions to ECAC-wide level of local procedures and parameters explored by previous EP3 WP3 exercises in short-term planning and execution phases will affect the network. This simulation scenario tries to get a global extrapolation of some of the EP3 WP3.3.2 exercise explored procedures and parameters.

Scenario configurations can be divided in two main groups. The first one includes the scenario SS7.2, which implements the integrated procedures over the base scenario (SS7.1). The second group (SS7.3 to SS7.5) adds shortfalls to more nodes, and reduces the anticipation.

The results show a significant improvement on the capacity indicators for SS7.2: that is, the coupling of the studied local procedures have positive effects on capacity. On the other side, capacity for the second group decreases.

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Figure 34: SS7 Daily Number of IFR Flights & Hourly Throughput Overloads

Conclusions Summing up, the results of the experiment confirm the validity of the underlying modelling principles of the validation tool to assess system-wide, network-level performances. In particular, the obtained results prove the importance of taking into account the complex, non-linear behaviour of the ATM network, and the intrinsic uncertainty present in the system. The results of the experiment:

• Confirm the validity of the underlying modelling principles of the validation tool, such as the complex, non-linear behaviour of the ATM network;

• Show the capability of the tool to assess system-wide, network-level performances;

• Confirm that the behaviour of the ATM system can change significantly depending on the amount of uncertainty present in the system: as an example, we have observed that certain operational concepts can provide a high benefit with a low level of uncertainty, but they bring little or no benefit (or even, in some cases, worsen performances) when uncertainty is increased; and

• Confirm the critical importance of studying the probability distribution of the Performance Indicators, due to the inherent uncertainty present in the ATM system.

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