AURORA is a research project funded by the SESAR Joint Undertaking within the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. AURORA has addressed the gaps of the flight efficiency indicator which is used today to evaluate the performance of the European ATM system. The current standard indicator is “horizontal flight efficiency”, which measures the horizontal excess en-route distance compared to the geodesic distance. This view of efficiency is very limited since it does not take into account other sources of inefficiencies, namely meteorological conditions and the vertical profile of the flight, and it does not address key aspects for Airspace Users (AUs)’ business strategies such as fuel consumption or costs.
AURORA has defined advanced user-centric indicators addressing the most relevant factors impacting flight efficiency, as well as equity indicators to measure how fairly the inefficiencies are distributed among AUs. AURORA has also designed methodologies to compute these indicators by means of the generation of user-preferred trajectories such as fuel- and cost-optimal trajectories. These methodologies allow obtaining the overall efficiency of a flight from origin to destination and also calculating efficiency in the context of the portion of the flight managed by a single Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP). In addition, AURORA has tested a service-oriented architecture that enables the calculation of the new indicators based on historical air traffic-related data, as well as a stream-based data model that allows calculating the indicators in real time by means of techniques borrowed from the data science and information management fields.
The set of proposed services for the computation of advanced user-centric efficiency and equity indicators has been identified as a relevant enabler that allows obtaining indicators based on historical surveillance, flight plan and weather data and without the need of confidential information from the Airspace Users.
Additionally, the approach to the on-line monitoring of efficiency indicators was recognized as a mean of providing relevant information for the improvement of the ATM decision-making processes encapsulating Airspace Users’ viewpoint on flight efficiency.
The AURORA consortium is formed by Centro de Referencia I+D+i ATM (CRIDA), Boeing Research and Technology Europe (BR&TE), Centre for Applied Data Analytics Research (CeADAR) and Flight Radar 24 (FR24) with the support of Iberia, Air Europa, KLM, Turkish Airlines and Novair as members of the AURORA’s Airspace Users Group.
