FRACS participates in the DECOR project for eco-responsible operations
After the PROVERT* project, FRACS continues to invest alongside THALES and DSNA to find ways to achieve the objectives of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the aviation industry.
FRACS is thus participating in the DECOR (ECO-Responsible Operation Demonstrator) research project alongside THALES, Airbus, Air France, Amelia, Atmosphere, CERFACS, CGX AERO and ONERA, which are the main partners of this project.
In this context, FRACS is in charge of establishing a catalogue of opportunities for eco-responsible flight operations. These are, first of all, opportunities for trajectory optimization in the vertical plane. The general idea is to identify all the constraints weighing on traffic and to determine those that could be alleviated in order to offer the aircraft concerned improved flight solutions in the environmental sense. For the project, the airspaces concerned are essentially en route airspaces. The work focuses primarily on ACC/SE and ACC/SW. It can then be extended according to the experience acquired to the other ACCs.
By relying on NEST, Eurocontrol’s system containing all the European flight plan archives and by replaying the traffic on DIADEME, our platform for airspace analysis, FRACS was able to analyse all the RADs (Route Availability Documents) in these airspaces. After defining a certain number of criteria for the possible alleviation of RAD constraints and analysing several hundred RADs by combining human expertise and automatic processing, it was thus possible to isolate about thirty opportunities and then to assess the consequences of a possible relaxation of the corresponding constraints.
At the same time, thanks to DIADEME, the analysis of flight profiles makes it possible to identify the flows that could clearly have benefited from a better trajectory and to understand the corresponding constraints, in particular those internal to the ACC and not explicit in the RADs.
Our methodical approach seems to be fruitful, and the next steps will be crucial to validate it, in particular by confronting our proposals with an operational vision and by implementing concrete cases on DIADEME that can thus be simulated and evaluated in terms of performance both in terms for air traffic control and flight operations.
With this project, we continue to increase our experience and develop methods, tools and approaches to optimize air navigation performance in an eco-responsible framework. This research and development project is therefore a natural fit with our strategy for the environment.
*PROVERT: pre-study that identified operational concepts, in particular the Green Flag concept, whose viability was demonstrated through the experiments carried out through the OCTAVIE project.
