Air Traffic Management (ATM) goals are to expedite the flow of air traffic while ensuring safety. Demand upon the ATM system is reaching its capacity levels, which introduces pressure on the economics of air transportation and accentuates the challenge of maintaining safety. Increased Automation promises to effectively balance the capacity issue while ensuring scalability and increasing resilience.

Automation cements the modernisation of ATM in Europe, and SESAR solutions are a realisation of the sustained effort during past years towards this goal. SESAR considers the automation and digitalisation principles, transposed to the European ATM Master Plan. They are founded on the application of technology impacting profoundly on organisations and changing how people operate the ATM system. These three pillars together represent the TOP (Technology, Organisation, People) approach, and the impact of a solution can only be evaluated by addressing these three elements simultaneously. Digital solutions bring digital footprints (data). Data can be organised, transformed and exploited to quantify that impact as a function of technical, organizational, human and procedural dimensions. The quantification of this impact will be based on a deep knowledge of how ATM provides safety before and after the solution is deployed. Learning from past incidents and accidents by using natural language processing and data analysis together with gathering operational expertise will pave the way to enrich accumulated safety knowledge with a more pro-active monitoring of the system.

FARO aims at bringing new lights about how safety and resilience are addressed in ATM, with 4 main objectives: the capitalisation on the existent knowledge of safety, the quantification of the impact of increasing the level of automation on ATM safety levels, the analysis of the impact of higher levels of automation on ATM resilience, and the provision of design guidelines and identification of future research needs.