The European aviation academic community are generating valuable new ideas for the modernisation of air traffic management. This was clear to see at the sixth edition of the SESAR Innovation Days (SIDs), which took place between 8 and 10 November at TU Delft in the Netherlands. Over the three days, Europe’s brightest minds in aviation research presented results from exploratory research projects. The event also served to present SESAR 2020, its scope of activities and how the programme is encouraging the flow of the results from exploratory research into the industrial research activities.
Bringing together more than 200 participants from both Europe and further afield, the event featured a number of keynote presentations, panel sessions and poster sessions highlighting some of today's most exciting research taking place in the field of air traffic management (ATM). The research topics applied a number of promising techniques including machine learning, big data analytics and modelling to address the big challenges facing ATM, from runway capacity at airports, the integration of drones, to the environmental, safety and human impact of various ATM procedures and technologies.
In his keynote, Jasper Daams, LVNL, illustrated just how important this research is for addressing the challenges associated with Europe’s existing legacy systems. Despite performing to a very high standard, the system needs to be upgraded in order to handle the fragmented airspace at a European level, he noted. He pointed to examples of research which have been matured and already implemented in the Netherlands, which he argued was proof of the SESAR vision of better connecting long-term research with industrial research activities. He also shared some ideas where future research efforts could be invested, in critical areas such as automation and keeping the human in the loop.
In his presentation, David Bowen, Chief of ATM at the SESAR Joint Undertaking, provided the audience with a view of the bigger SESAR picture and where exploratory sits within the SESAR research programme. He emphasised the value of the results that have already been delivered though the exploratory research strand. He noted that the strategy with SESAR 2020 was to better connect this important work to the other strands of the programme, namely the industrial research activities and large-scale demonstrations. He took the opportunity to update the community of the latest calls, their scope and budget.
The event also featured a keynote by Will Dubyak, IBM, who presented Watson, a natural language processing application which understands questions, produces possible answers, analyses evidence, computes confidence in its results, and delivers answers with associated evidence and confidence levels. It does this with a vast database of structured and unstructured content. Such tools are not about taking the human out of the loop, but instead supporting people to do their jobs faster and more efficiently, argued Dr Dubyak. Watson is used in a variety of fields, including aerospace, to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation. Dr Dubyak pointed to aviation where he showed how the tool could be used for analysing and fully leveraging massive amounts of technical information, allowing for better decision making among aviation stakeholders.
Bringing the event to a close, it was announced that the 7th edition of the SESAR Innovation Days will take place in Belgrade form 28 to 30 November 2017.