Accelerating Change in ATM

Topic description

Specific Challenge:

Due to growing demand, new regulations, the emergence of new market entrants and innovation in business models there is an increasing market pressure and a need for increasing operational resilience and agility with continued pressure on Europe-wide cost efficiency for aviation and air traffic management. New technology advancements could provide the necessary improvements but the process from innovation to deployment in ATM is currently slow. Research is need to better understand the economic barriers and to identify mechanisms (including, but not limited to, regulations) to accelerate the Research and Innovation (R&I) lifecycle.

The range of research that could be covered in this topic is broad and topics mentioned here are only indicative. Research proposals may target and challenge existing SES economic, regulatory and legal frameworks within the timeframes set-out in the Flightpath 2050 vision document.

Research activities should study potential measures to speed up/shorten the R&I lifecycle. This includes changes driven by regulation or derived from natural or forced economic incentives. As introducing new ATM operational improvements often requires the deployment of enabling ground and airborne technology, the adoption of novel technologies in ATM is also determined by the pace of ground system and avionic updates cycle. In particular, proposals may investigate how to accelerate the avionics update cycle. Research activities should study the state of the art practices in ground system and avionics update cycle, explore potential benefits of moving to shorter cycles and identify and evaluate mechanisms to speed-up the spread and adoption of novel technologies or accelerate and lighten any certification and/or approval processes. Proposals may, for example, investigate the feasibility and the potential impact of introducing best equipped or best performing – best served rules through case studies and extract lessons learned.

Proposals may also explore ideas and measures to shorten the R&I lifecycle by focusing on the gap between R&D and deployment. For example, projects may analyse case studies of previous successful or unsuccessful deployment experiences in order to extract lessons learned and develop innovative ways for aligning technology investment and business needs that could help reducing the time between these two phases. Projects may also analyse the challenges associated to the deployment of a specific SESAR solution, be it an already mature solution or one that is still in the research phase.

Proposals may investigate the feasibility of setting up a framework for assessing the impact that regulations will have in practice (e.g. via pilot projects or regulation restricted to a limited area). Although models and simulations are available to assess the effect of policy decisions and regulations in advance, the validity of these approaches remain limited and policy decision still have to be made under high levels of uncertainty regarding their effects. A regulatory testbed should allow to test policy decisions while limiting their potential negative impact. Projects investigating this possibility may analyse the state-of-the-art and best practices in other domains and assess their applicability to the ATM domain.

Proposals are expected to contribute to a better understanding of change and barriers of change in ATM and to provide recommendations on how to facilitate change in ATM. This should contribute to accelerating development and deployment of new technologies better fitting stakeholder needs and consequently accelerating the achievement of the ATM Master Plan performance ambition enabled by SESAR solutions.