Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FF2020 (Creating the 21st century spatial ecosystem)
Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2024-02-29
It is expected that 80% of the worldwide population inhabit cities in 2050, which means communities should rethink how transportation is provided. Existing infrastructures are about to collapse, so to make transport on the surface of our planet a less crowded, we can either go up (air) or down (underground). Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is the use of small highly automated aircraft to carry passengers or cargo at lower altitudes in urban and suburban areas which have been developed in response to traffic congestion. There are still a lot of hurdles to take before we can be sure that UAM can be a useful puzzle piece in the future of transportation. The focus of FF2020 is to research and develop a combination of solutions that will help take these hurdles.
The worldwide digital transformation is accelerating the disruptive innovation UAM can bring, not only in aviation but also in mobility systems and Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans. However no Low-level Traffic Management (LTM) system exists to organise the activity of thousands of UAS in airspace where also manned aircraft may travel (e.g. helicopters in an emergency or medical services). Furthermore, traditional communication, navigation and traffic surveillance systems do not include airspace at a very low level over urban areas. There are several hurdles with infrastructure, technology and legal issues that must be solved, including the involvement of the local municipal administrations. In fact, while aviation authorities are essentially responsible for the safety of flight, municipal authorities are responsible to govern the territory. For flights at a low level, both responsibilities overlap and therefore they need an efficient platform to discharge their respective tasks as swiftly as demanded by modern society.
FF2020’s goals are ambitious: Ease the integration (of UAM) in the legal regulatory framework; Ensure control with the provision of a governance model, interoperability frameworks and an Identity of Things (IdoT) scheme; Facilitate the implementation of UAM services based on European principles in cities and ecosystems; To identify strategies and foster replicability and scalability; To promote and provide the scientific community and industry with a better understanding of the project outcomes and overcoming current challenges
The worldwide digital transformation is accelerating the disruptive innovation UAM can bring, not only in aviation but also in mobility systems and Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans. However no Low-level Traffic Management (LTM) system exists to organise the activity of thousands of UAS in airspace where also manned aircraft may travel (e.g. helicopters in an emergency or medical services). Furthermore, traditional communication, navigation and traffic surveillance systems do not include airspace at a very low level over urban areas. There are several hurdles with infrastructure, technology and legal issues that must be solved, including the involvement of the local municipal administrations. In fact, while aviation authorities are essentially responsible for the safety of flight, municipal authorities are responsible to govern the territory. For flights at a low level, both responsibilities overlap and therefore they need an efficient platform to discharge their respective tasks as swiftly as demanded by modern society.
FF2020’s goals are ambitious: Ease the integration (of UAM) in the legal regulatory framework; Ensure control with the provision of a governance model, interoperability frameworks and an Identity of Things (IdoT) scheme; Facilitate the implementation of UAM services based on European principles in cities and ecosystems; To identify strategies and foster replicability and scalability; To promote and provide the scientific community and industry with a better understanding of the project outcomes and overcoming current challenges
A selection of 17 of the exploitable results were described in the exploitation plan. These exploitable results were analyzed and strengtened by underlying businessplans.
-Digital Toolbox Platform
-SAMWISE - SORA Online Tool
-Learning Platform
-ISO 23629-12
-Digital Geospatial Infrastructure for UAM
-Semantic Analysis of Drone Rules
-IDOT Scheme and Governance Model
-UAM Ecosystem for the Tartu Region
-A campus drone Test Site
-Membership-Based UAM Ecosystem/Hub
-Project Management & Consultancy for UAM Innovation
-Model of a UAM Ecosystem for a Hospital
-Service Design of Biomedical Material Transportation
-Service Design of Drone Surveillance System for Emergencies
-UAS Machine-Readable Laws
-5G-Heatmap Code & Segmentation Methods
-Service Design of Drone System for Detection
-Digital Toolbox Platform
-SAMWISE - SORA Online Tool
-Learning Platform
-ISO 23629-12
-Digital Geospatial Infrastructure for UAM
-Semantic Analysis of Drone Rules
-IDOT Scheme and Governance Model
-UAM Ecosystem for the Tartu Region
-A campus drone Test Site
-Membership-Based UAM Ecosystem/Hub
-Project Management & Consultancy for UAM Innovation
-Model of a UAM Ecosystem for a Hospital
-Service Design of Biomedical Material Transportation
-Service Design of Drone Surveillance System for Emergencies
-UAS Machine-Readable Laws
-5G-Heatmap Code & Segmentation Methods
-Service Design of Drone System for Detection
By the end of the project period, we successfully developed a functional DIGITAL TOOLBOX proof of concept along with a potential business model. This plug-and-play environment, which is technology agnostic, will in future assist cities in avoiding vendor lock-in within the UAM technology sector and will foster trust among citizens regarding the use of UAM in their airspace through enhanced transparency. This initiative will effectively eliminate several significant barriers to the adoption of UAM.
The UAM INTEROPERABILITY GOVERNANCE MODEL, the IDOT SCHEME, and the INTEROPERABILITY FRAMEWORK were refined through experiences gained from integrating with other FF2020 frameworks during tests in the living labs. These developments have ensured that UAM activities can be conducted in accordance with EU governance models in a standardized manner.
To further facilitate the integration of UAM into the European regulatory framework, FF2020 successfully:
• Created an overview of applicable laws through subject matter experts and citation analysis.
• Created a drone rule ontology was through converting individual sentences into machine-readable instructions. This, in it’s turn, was created into a queryable database for operators to question predone SORA’s and for municipalities to get a minimum level of understanding of the rules.
• Developed and tested methods to extract relevant information from rules, in order to try express regulation in a machine-interpretable and machine-executable format.
Akey innovation of FF2020, lies in the efficient querying, visualization and handling of transactions on assets, most vitally, validation of changes to those assets, such as location or ownership. This is belied to the Geospatial digital infrastructure. Legacy networking and communication protocols (TCP/IP etc) lack “spatial” dimensions. They do not possess the ability to explicitly describe, query or update the specific location or orientation of an object within a physical or virtual space, nor do they include a common language for correlating those spatial relationships to permissions and trade contracts.
During the project period all above frameworks were tested in 5 living labs and their use cases. This has resulted in tested and iterated frameworks achieve the highest standards. They provided clear results that furthered the current state of knowledge through 11 scientific articles.
Identification and introduction of a function we defined as “Fleet Manager” in the current ISO standards that was not yet described. FF2020 partners introduced and are guiding this change in the ISO working groups. It will add a great improvement to the field of UAM.
The UAM INTEROPERABILITY GOVERNANCE MODEL, the IDOT SCHEME, and the INTEROPERABILITY FRAMEWORK were refined through experiences gained from integrating with other FF2020 frameworks during tests in the living labs. These developments have ensured that UAM activities can be conducted in accordance with EU governance models in a standardized manner.
To further facilitate the integration of UAM into the European regulatory framework, FF2020 successfully:
• Created an overview of applicable laws through subject matter experts and citation analysis.
• Created a drone rule ontology was through converting individual sentences into machine-readable instructions. This, in it’s turn, was created into a queryable database for operators to question predone SORA’s and for municipalities to get a minimum level of understanding of the rules.
• Developed and tested methods to extract relevant information from rules, in order to try express regulation in a machine-interpretable and machine-executable format.
Akey innovation of FF2020, lies in the efficient querying, visualization and handling of transactions on assets, most vitally, validation of changes to those assets, such as location or ownership. This is belied to the Geospatial digital infrastructure. Legacy networking and communication protocols (TCP/IP etc) lack “spatial” dimensions. They do not possess the ability to explicitly describe, query or update the specific location or orientation of an object within a physical or virtual space, nor do they include a common language for correlating those spatial relationships to permissions and trade contracts.
During the project period all above frameworks were tested in 5 living labs and their use cases. This has resulted in tested and iterated frameworks achieve the highest standards. They provided clear results that furthered the current state of knowledge through 11 scientific articles.
Identification and introduction of a function we defined as “Fleet Manager” in the current ISO standards that was not yet described. FF2020 partners introduced and are guiding this change in the ISO working groups. It will add a great improvement to the field of UAM.