TaCo kicked-off on June 2016 in Rome. The first activity has been the preparation and consolidation of a Project Management Plan(D1.1). The ethics deliverable have been also submitted.
The first technical activities of TaCo started with D2.1 - Problem definition and D2.2 - State of the art. During such activities a meeting involving the consortium has been held at Malta International Airport. It aimed at identifing and observing on the field the airport layout and procedural aspects, tower location, layout and organization, airport complexity factors, challenges brought to tower ATCos' by nominal and non-nominal operational conditions, preliminary needs to be adressed by automation brought by TaCo. Main outcomes have been the definition of some traffic and operational scenarios, the elicitation of preliminary user needs and some indications about beneficial automation strategies to be designed in the following of the project.
In Workpackage 3 of the project the operational needs of MATS have been used as a reference to develop a prototype of automatic tools able to support the ground controller in his tasks.
The resulting architecture and code served as input for WP 4: the prototype have been made available through the HMI of the visual language and of the global optimization strategies, so that end-users are able to tune them.
The main objective of WP4 was the design and development of a demonstrative Domain Specific Graphical Language (DSGL) and an early stage simulation application that uses the DSGL to enable tuning of the reactive part of the automation. A first sub-objective is to study the state of the art in End-User Programming of reactive programs related to Automation Algorithms; a second sub-objective is to design a DSGL oriented towards Airport Automation; a third sub-objective is to design and develop an HMI to enable end-users to control and tune in real-time the strategy and the behavior of the automation. The resulting behavior has been evaluated in WP5.
The main activity of WP5 has been the final evaluation of TaCO outcomes. It addressed the main components aiming at collecting qualitative results on their acceptance, suitability and potential issues regarding their introduction and usage.
The evaluation of TaCo’s framework involved both Malta International Airport tower controllers (end-users) and external stakeholders coming from the airport domain during two workshops.
Results show positive feedback from end-users as well as from external stakeholders. The introduction of automation strategies was considered beneficial and additional promising strategies were identified during the evaluation. Such strategies were not only perceived as a support for optimization, but more in general, as an assistant for coping with specific situations.
The main communication and dissemination actions carried out during the project are the following:
• towards the SESAR and H2020 programs, leading to a close collaboration with other European research projects, resulting in the elaboration of coordinated factsheets and in the joint application for the Common dissemination booster service;
• towards general public, with the TaCo project website and social networks;
• towards scientific community, through the publication and the presentation of research work elaborated to contribute to the TaCo project;
• towards the Air Traffic Management and Airports community, through the collaboration with Airport Council International Europe and the participation in two editions of World ATM Congress.
