Online repository highlights security and safety advances in aviation
The European Commission has a vision for the future of European aviation called Flightpath 2050. One of its key goals is to ensure the security and safety of all types of aircraft, with less than one accident per 10 million commercial flights. Numerous related Horizon 2020 projects have been funded to get us there. But there is one problem: the absence of a real overview of everything that’s being done in research. Simply put, we don’t have enough means to ensure that the EU is on track to meet its targets. OPTICS2 (Observation Platform for Technological and Institutional Consolidation of research in Safety and Security) addresses that problem with a comprehensive assessment of relevant security and safety projects in the air transport field. “We deliver a yearly state-of-the-art report on European aviation safety and security research. Each report identifies research gaps and bottlenecks for innovation, while providing the European Commission with recommendations on how to best address them,” states Micol Biscotto, coordinator of OPTICS2 and project manager at Deep Blue. The project consortium actually keeps all stakeholders in the loop. EU agencies and national authorities receive the project’s views on progress towards Flightpath 2050 goals, blocking issues and advice on future Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) revisions. The Advisory Council for Aviation Research and Innovation in Europe (ACARE) and industry are informed of the state of the art in aviation safety and security research, as well as past and ongoing research on specific topics and solutions ready/not ready for adoption. Finally, the research community learns about trending topics and gets a chance to influence the EU Work Programme. It all forms a virtuous feedback loop encouraging innovation.
Benchmarking innovation
Besides its reports, the project team feeds the OPTICS2 Open Repository: an online database presenting the state of the art in research in an engaging, comprehensive and interactive manner. The platform is, according to Biscotto’s own words, open source, sustainable, interactive, engaging, simple and intuitive. All stakeholders involved in aviation safety and security research will find something of interest as they navigate it. “Everyone stands to benefit,” Biscotto explains. “EU agencies for example, have a better idea of the level of maturity and ease of adoption of the funded projects, as well as the areas and topics that are not sufficiently covered yet. Meanwhile, the research community and industry will find added value in our benchmarking, which complements well other databases such as CORDIS, the H2020 Dashboard and TRIMIS.” Much has already changed since the project began in 2017. “Certain areas which were under-researched are now being addressed. There is a substantial number of new projects on drones, but also advances in governing safe performance, resilience by design and attempts to integrate human factors already at the design stage in a multimodal setting (aviation and maritime),” says Biscotto. “On security aspects, there have been research advances in building and exploiting security intelligence, for example in forensic methods and resolving incidents related to terrorist attacks. We observed early development of the security radar concept, as well as an attempt to develop a security baseline across all transport modes.” Despite all these positive advances, several research priorities remain and which OPTICS2 doesn’t fail to point out. These include matters related to the human role in future aviation, aircraft survivability, certification methods, biological threats and a sector-wide security culture. The project team is currently working on its 4th-year assessment, which will put special emphasis on investment in research and research contribution to competitiveness, standards and regulations. Biscotto and her peers are also eying a future international benchmarking.
Keywords
OPTICS2, aircraft, security, safety, aviation, research, Flightpath 2050
