Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform airport ground operations. ASTAIR (Auto-Steer Taxi at AIRport), a recently started SESAR 3 JU project, will develop an AI-enabled tool to support a wide variety of ground procedures aimed at optimising resources, and enhancing the safety and efficiency of a wide range of airside operations at the airport.
Launched in September, the project will use AI to prompt actions, such as providing clearances to vehicles on the airport aprons and taxiways according to optimal routes and managing fleets of autonomous tugs to further enhance ground capacity. While automation will be at the forefront, human-centred tools are requisite to supervise, predict, and seamlessly integrate human intervention whenever necessary to fully harness its potential. A key focus of ASTAIR will be in optimising humans and AI interaction by tailoring intelligent systems to operators' modus operandi, ensuring logical consistency across manual and automated control.
The initiative will introduce interactive tools and adaptive AI algorithms that leverage the operators’ expertise for controlling and engaging with automation at various levels, ensuring that automation doesn’t just replace, but also collaborates and adapts.
ASTAIR Project Coordinator said: Integrating more closely existing processes in an automated supervision system will facilitate global optimisation. The objective of project ASTAIR is to make it ‘human readable’ and easy to handle by the operator.
ASTAIR builds on the achievements of the Horizon 2020 funded project, AEON (Advanced Engine Off Navigation), which developed a new concept of operations to support engine-off taxing, introducing the role of a fleet manager to supervise and allocate a fleet of towing vehicles to aircraft with dedicated algorithms and interfaces.
ASTAIR is a collaborative project involving the following organisations:
- ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile (Project Coordinator, France)
- Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
- Deep Blue (Italy)
- EUROCONTROL (Belgium)
- Groupe ADP - Aéroports de Paris (France)
More about ASTAIR
More about AEON
