The provision of ATM services has for a long time been a national monopoly, with the important role attributed to the nation state (by ICAO) of managing air traffic safely in its national airspace. In addition, provision of air traffic services (ATS) has traditionally been considered a natural monopoly due to the large infrastructure investments. These elements are now both changing. The European Union is increasingly entering the air traffic management world, opposing the national character of the industry and increasing the scale at which air traffic services could be provided. In addition, technological changes are more and more reducing the need for large scale ground-based infrastructure and expensive equipment, putting into question the natural monopoly character of the industry. Therefore today is the right time to study the liberalization and introduction of competition in the ATM sector. However, competition can be introduced at various levels and in different ways. The overall goal of COMPAIR is to investigate how to introduce competitive incentives in the ATM sector so as to best contribute to the achievement of the European high-level policy objectives for aviation. The project will pursue the following objectives: 1. propose a set of new institutional market designs for the introduction of competition in the European ATM sector; 2. define a framework allowing a comprehensive assessment of the impact of different institutional market designs on ATM stakeholders and society at large; 3. develop a variety of economic and network simulation models allowing the evaluation of the proposed regulatory approaches along the dimensions identified as relevant in the assessment framework; 4. assess the feasibility and acceptability of proposed institutional changes for various market actors; 5. propose a vision and derive policy recommendations for the implementation of those new institutional structures identified as most beneficial for the European ATM system.

ATM performance results from the complex interaction of interdependent policies and regulations, stakeholders, technologies and market conditions. Trade-offs arise not only between KPAs, but also between stakeholders, as well as between short-term and long-term objectives. While a lot of effort has traditionally been devoted to the development of microscopic performance models, there is a lack of useful macro approaches able to translate local improvements or specific regulations into their impact on high-level, system-wide KPIs. The goal of INTUIT is to explore the potential of visual analytics, machine learning and systems modelling techniques to improve our understanding of the trade-offs between ATM KPAs, identify cause-effect relationships between KPIs at different scales, and develop new decision support tools for ATM performance monitoring and management. The specific objectives of the project are: 1. to conduct a systematic characterisation of the ATM performance datasets available at different spatial and temporal scales and evaluate their potential to inform the development of new indicators and modelling approaches; 2. to propose new metrics and indicators providing new angles of analysis of ATM performance; 3. to develop a set of visual analytics and machine learning algorithms for the extraction of relevant and understandable patterns from ATM performance data; 4. to investigate new data-driven modelling techniques and evaluate their potential to provide new insights about cause-effect relationships between performance drivers and performance indicators; 5. to integrate the newly developed analytical and visualisation functionalities into an interactive dashboard supporting multi-dimensional performance assessment and decision making for both monitoring and management purposes.

The goal of ITACA is to accelerate the development, adoption and deployment of new technologies in ATM. In order to contribute to achieving this general objective, ITACA will develop a new set of methodologies and tools enabling the rigorous and comprehensive assessment of policies and regulations aimed at amplifying the uptake of new technologies within ATM. The specific objectives of the project are: 1. Identify the main drivers and barriers for technological change in ATM and devise a set of policy measures and regulatory changes with the potential to lower such barriers and incentivise faster technology upgrade. 2. Develop an agent-based model of the R&I lifecycle allowing the representation of the complex decisions and interactions between ATM stakeholders and their impact on the development and implementation of new technologies. 3. Validate the behavioural assumptions of the agent-based model through a set of participatory simulation experiments involving the direct participation of ATM stakeholders. 4. Demonstrate and evaluate the potential of the newly developed methods and tools through a set of policy assessment exercises that will analyse the impact of a variety of policies and regulatory changes aimed at accelerating technology change in ATM, with particular focus on the distributional effects of the proposed policies across ATM stakeholders and society at large. 5. Consolidate the methods, tools and lessons learnt delivered by the project into a coherent policy assessment framework and a set of policy recommendations, and provide guidelines for the future maintenance, evolution and use of the proposed framework.