To achieve the European goal of seamless door-to-door (D2D) travel, air transport needs to  be part of an intermodal network that includes other available transportation means such as rail, road and sea. Such a network would address connections between a big metropolis and  the surrounding area up to country-wide level.

X-TEAM D2D addressed seamless integration of air traffic management and air transport in urban and suburban environments and identified enabling technologies applicable in the short term and longer term. Taking multimodal transport use cases, the research highlighted barriers to the implementation of the envisaged scenarios and provided detailed outcomes related to baseline (2025),  intermediate (2035) and final (2050) target time horizons. 

The project designed a concept of operations (ConOps) for the definition of an integrated multimodal transport network, implementing a total traffic management (TTM) approach,  including a high-level description of the system architecture and related main components.  It also identified the associated system requirements, as well as expected user requirements over the next decades, and designed a dedicated service blueprint to model the interaction of the passengers with  the infrastructure throughout the whole D2D journey. This identified the main organisational needs and policy steps for the transition from the current situation towards the integrated X-TEAM D2D defined infrastructure. 

Moving from the current situation where each leg of the journey has its own service, to an integrated transport service that is unique to each passenger for the whole D2D journey, led to the formulation of the X-TEAM D2D ConOps, paving the way to total traffic management for all modes of transport where travellers’ preferences have a high priority. 

To validate the X-TEAM D2D ConOps, two performance areas were assessed: Journey efficiency – measured in terms of total distance travelled, total travel time, and average travel speed per passenger); and quality of travelling for passengers, based on the waiting time at interconnections.

Benefits

• More efficient door-to-door travel
• Identified enablers and barriers
• Centralises passenger needs