SESAR 2020 members and partners recently reached agreement on a new collaborative framework aimed at improving resource planning and the performance of the air traffic management network in Europe.

From March to June 2017, the SESAR project on advanced demand capacity balancing (PJ09) organised a number of workshops with representatives from the Network Manager, air navigation service providers, airports, and airspace users. The workshops also brought together representatives from SESAR 2020 projects related to enhanced arrival and departure management projects (PJ01), total airport management (PJ04), (free route PJ06), optimised airspace users operations (PJ07), advanced airspace management (P08), 4D trajectory management (PJ18) and network collaborative management (PJ24).

Together the partners reviewed and collaboratively defined the framework for the performance-driven network management concept.

The framework will enable a variety of operational improvements:

• Improved trajectory forecasting and enriched en-route and airport information sharing leading to more accurate detection of network imbalances in terms of demand and capacity;
• Seamless integration of local, short-term planning with extended planning thanks to the introduction of an integrated network management and extended ATC planning (INAP) function;
• Introduction of advanced demand capacity balancing (DCB) to support collaborative decision-making between stakeholders. The new network performance framework evolves from a one dimensional delay minimisation to a holistic business-oriented approach considering all stakeholders business needs dynamically as an input to the DCB process.
• Synchronised management of concurrent DCB measures taken at local level to support respective stakeholders DCB plans. Linked to this is the introduction of a constraint reconciliation service monitoring and arbitrating locally planned DCB target-time solutions at network level to ensure macro performance and global consistency.

The next steps of the project will be to define a set of roles, responsibilities, rules and procedures concerning the initiation, delegation, coordination, implementation and monitoring of subsidiary DCB activities in the context of this new collaborative network performance framework.

This project has received funding from the SESAR Joint Undertaking under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731730.