Objectives

Today, air traffic congestion or hotspots are identified using flight plan data and are managed in the pre-tactical stage of the flight. However, on the day of operation, an aircraft's actual trajectory may differ significantly from its flight plan and, as a result, hotspots still occur and these have to be resolved by the controllers (ATCOs) without sufficient advance notice. With today's tools, tactical hotspots are only identified up to around 20 minutes in advance. The aim of ASTRA was to predict and resolve hotspots much earlier than today using an AI-enabled tool. The overall aim was to optimise capacity while enabling aircraft to adhere to more efficient and green trajectories.