SPATIO is a three-year SESAR 3 JU project that addresses separation between unmanned air vehicles, in particular, strategic and tactical conflict resolution services and the relationship between separation and capacity in U-space airspace. The SPATIO consortium brings together the unmanned aircraft and aviation industry, air navigation service providers, as well as research institutions for a total of 23 partners from 10 different countries.

Keeping aircraft safely separated is one of the core functions of air traffic management (ATM) today. As larger numbers of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) take to the skies, separation management becomes more important to avoid mid-air collisions.

Building upon the work of previous SESAR exploratory and very large-scale demonstration projects such as DACUS, BUBBLES, and TindAIR, SPATIO short for “U-space Separation Management”, will develop and validate in a real operating environment four elements:

• A dynamic capacity management (DCM) service for U-space.

• An advanced strategic conflict resolution (SCR) service for U-space, which considers Fairness among operators and is integrated with the dynamic capacity balancing service.

• A tactical conflict resolution (TCR) service, whose instructions are implemented manually by the remote pilot through an improved Ground Control Station.

• An advanced tactical conflict resolution (TCR) service, whose instructions are implemented autonomously by command instructions to the UAS.

Funded within the framework of Horizon Europe, SPATIO will develop a classification of U-space airspaces according to their separation and capacity management needs. Required services, specificities of the regulatory and standardisation needs, as well as costs and benefits associated with the implementation of U-space services will be detailed. Overall, SPATIO solutions will benefit the safe and secure simultaneous UAS operations in high-risk areas such as airport vicinities, thus facilitating the societal acceptance of these operations in urban environments.

SPATIO Project Manager, Pablo Sánchez-Escalonilla, explains that “for the first time, SPATIO has constituted a consortium with research institutions and universities that have been previously researching on UAS separation management in SESAR with key industrial entities in the U-space domain, all of them engaged in the common objective of developing a ready-to-implement solution after three years”.

The group working on the project will be guided by ENAIRE – Spanish Air Navigation Service Provider and includes the following partners: Acubed, Airbus, Boeing, Collins Aerospace, CRIDA A.I.E., Deep Blue, D-Flight, EUROCONTROL, INCAS - National Institute for Aerospace Research "Elie Carafoli", Indra, INECO, AirNav Ireland, EuroUSC Italia S.r.l., Metron Aviation, ROMATSA, Sopra Steria, Unifly, Unisphere, Universitat Politècnica de València, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, VTT.

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