Overview
AEON aims at fostering the usage of environmentally friendly ground operations techniques:
- Non autonomous taxiing such as TaxiBots;
- Autonomous taxiing like E-Taxi;
- Single Engine Taxiing as last option.
The project will be defining a concept of operations focusing on engine-off taxiing techniques based on a set of dedicated tools such as fleet management for TaxiBots and supervision interfaces to support the operators and their collaborations. AEON will consider the concept on different time ranges:
- Long term strategy: investment model to help an airport or an airline evaluate their interest in the concept
- Operations strategic phase: proposition of the different techniques to use on each aircraft movement to minimise fuel consumption and nocive emissions without impact on the arriving and departing flight schedules.
- Operations tactical phase: real time evaluation of environmental indicators to support decision making, conflict free routing for all vehicles, reallocation of techniques to adapt to real time events, etc.
Depending on the chosen operational strategies, these operations will require the collaboration of different actors at the airport, from ATC to airline and airport operators. The main research question that AEON addresses is: "what should the operations performed by taxiing actors and automation be designed to benefit the most from engine-off taxiing-capable aircraft and autonomous tug in terms of safety, capacity and environmental impact?"
In particular, we address the following questions:
- How to determine in real time efficient, conflict-free routing plans autonomous and non-autonomous aircraft taxiing from gates to the corresponding runways and the other way around?;
- How to schedule for taxiing a fleet of towing vehicles during the day of operations?
- How to dynamically adjust this schedule when operations disruptions occur?;
- How to manage and adjust real-time collaboration between human operators and automation?
- What are the costs for an airport to build the required infrastructure that enables electric taxiing?
- What are the benefits of implementing electric taxiing at an airport?
The AEON project will hence provide tools that should be part of an airport collaborative decision-making tool. Based on their experience in other research projects, the consortium will develop an operational concept and formalise it on a documentation derived from the OSED/SPR/INTEROP template of the SESAR2020 industrial research. The project is part of the SESAR 2020 programme which aims to modernise all aspects of air traffic management in Europe.