What is the added value of being a member of the SESAR 3 JU?

Direct participation in the Joint Undertaking allows CIRA to benefit from direct interaction with all the most relevant stakeholders in the ATM domain. This is an opportunity to better tailor and expand CIRA activities on research topics, which are widely recognised as the most relevant by leaders in the ATM community.

For a research organisation like CIRA, membership also is crucial for enabling cross-fertilisation within the ATM operational domain, since Europe’s major air navigation service providers are represented in the parternership. The same consideration applies to interaction with the most relevant industrial stakeholders in ATM.

As non-profit entities, research organisations like CIRA can play a crucial independent role in providing a scientific and technical perspective, providing a critical assessment of promising solutions.

Why is air traffic management and its digital transformation important to CIRA?

CIRA is a research organisation with competencies in many aerospace disciplines, with dedicated departments addressing air traffic management, air transport safety, security and sustainability, multimodality and integrated transport, automation and autonomy, navigation and control, weather and climate, and others. The activities of such departments directly address ATM or provide results that can be exploited in ATM. Thanks to its participation in the SESAR 3 JU, CIRA is expanding its support for the modernisation of ATM by exploiting possible cross-fertillisation between disciplines, which on the surface may be facing different, often competing challenges, e.g. performance and safety, safety and security, sustainability and cost efficiency, interoperability and security, sustainability and public acceptance, etc.

What are CIRA’s top three innovation priorities?

CIRA’s strategic priority is to act as the Italian research hub for ATM research, linking blue-sky research developments to industrialisation through an independent assessment of performance, and supporting public and regulatory authorities. Many operational changes are identified by SESAR 3 JU for the implementation of a new ATM target architecture. CIRA is focused on the near/medium term, up to the long-term time horizon. As such its priorities are as follows:

• supporting the implementation of reliable digitalisation of ATM in order to allow easier, faster, safer and more secure processing of digital traffic management data;
• increasing the automation of the traffic management processes, in the strategic phase as well as the tactical phase, where the role of the human is maintained but strongly supported by automation (autonomy)
• completing the development of U-space services and their effective and safe integration and interfacing with ATM.

In which flagships of the Digital European Sky programme is CIRA particularly interested in getting involved, and why?

According to the competencies, CIRA’s interests are on U-space, urban air mobility (UAM) or advanced air mobility, higher airspace operations, artificial intelligence for aviation and multimodality and passenger experience. In U-space and Urban air mobility, CIRA can contribute to automation and autonomy due to decades of research and participation in recent and ongoing projects. For artificial intelligence, CIRA supports its adoption in aviation, according to a gradual approach assuring reliability, thus increasing trustworthiness. Data-driven applications can improve operations in airports. AI can support decisions in non-time critical situations. AI-powered strategic planning enables the seamless integration of higher space operations. The integration of ground and board by different digital assistants represents a stream of research where CIRA is active. About multimodality, finally, CIRA recently started to work in this domain and aims to expand here, having already played a relevant role by leading one of the dedicated SESAR 3 JU exploratory research projects completed at the end of 2022.