Delivering high performing aviation 

Deliver high performing aviation

A performance-driven ATM system is recognised as a critical element for the sustainability of Europe’s aviation and air transport sectors. This requires performance indicators representing stakeholder needs. Currently, flight efficiency, as defined in the Single European Sky Performance Scheme, measures the horizontal excess en-route distance compared to the geodesic distance.  This view of efficiency is very limited since it does not take into account other sources of inefficiencies, namely meteorological conditions or the vertical profile of the flight, and it does not address key aspects for the airlines’ business strategies such as fuel consumption or costs.

AURORA sought to address this issue and explored new efficiency indicators that encapsulate fuel consumption, schedule adherence, route charges and overall cost efficiency of flights. A key difference between these new efficiency indicators and today’s indicator is that their calculation requires the generation of user-preferred trajectories, i.e. fuel and cost-optimal trajectories, considering the impact of weather conditions and without the need of confidential information from airlines. AURORA demonstrated that flight inefficiency in terms of costs is not necessarily aligned with inefficiency in terms of horizontal difference, and that the new indicators can better capture these cost-based inefficiencies. The new indicators were validated by a group of airlines in terms of representativeness, transparency and usability.

The project also proposed indicators to measure how fairly the inefficiencies in the system are distributed among airlines. These indicators can serve to quantify the differences in the inefficiencies experienced by airlines in a given area.

AURORA also developed a methodology based on big data to calculate these new efficiency indicators in real time. AURORA demonstrated the benefits of monitoring efficiency indicators in real time for the resolution of short-term traffic imbalances, taking into consideration the impact on flight efficiency.

Benefits

Improved flight efficiency indicators considering weather

Indicators based on fuel and costs

Real-time indicators

Projects Deliverables

699340_D5.1_Performance assessment of the real-time performance monitoring framework

699340_D5.1_Report on testing of advanced performance data model