TITAN Kicks-off its “Integration in the Air Transport System” and Holds Fourth Progress Meeting
On 31/01/2012, in TITAN, by steve
The EC 7th Framework Program project TITAN is slowly approaching the final leg of its exciting three year circuit looking at improving the aircraft turnaround process. The TITAN partners gathered in Madrid, Spain, on 14-15 December to review progress and to kick-off WP6. I will come back on the significance of this work-package in moment.
Participation, as we have grown used to in this project, was very good and SESAR also sent its WP6 (Airport) leader for good measure.
Participants noted that the general economic malaise was also impacting the air transport industry and it was increasingly difficult to get contributions in kind from airlines and even airports as they themselves were increasingly short of resources. Nevertheless the project partners were calling on their network of experts to compensate this unfortunate situation to the maximum extent possible.
Good news came in the form of the realization that based on the outcome of the gaming exercises run in the fall of last year, only minor changes to the TITAN Concept of Operations will be required. This is important as it confirms that the project has been on the right track from the start and is also the key to the longer term stability of the work.
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TITAN – The best game in town
On 14/11/2011, in TITAN, by steve
No, this is not something new for your Wii or other gaming platform… sorry.
True, experts participating in the TITAN project gathered in Budapest’s Airport Hotel for a gaming exercise but this was serious business. The project has reached an important phase in its development: it was time to validate the services and information defined as the basis of the TITAN concept of operations.
As you will recall, TITAN is about optimizing the aircraft turnaround process by making it more predictable. This is achieved by creating a picture of the turnaround that shows much more detail than was previously the case. TITAN uses a service oriented architecture and some elements of the SWIM concept have also been incorporated. All information is shared and users access information via subscriptions and in accordance with the access rights defined as one of the characteristics of the various data elements.
Gaming is more or less what its title suggests: you get some folks together, assign them various roles that correspond to the roles in the real life environment you are trying to validate and they “play” out their role as pre-written scenarios evolve. In the case of TITAN, the whole affair started with the selected participants being asked to subscribe to the information they thought would be required to perform their roles. So, the persons acting as ground handler, airport operator, airline and ATC had to stop and think what exactly they would need to facilitate the turnaround, knowing of course that asking for too much information is both expensive and can lead to information overload.
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TITAN – a smart layer upon Airport CDM
On 17/08/2011, in TITAN, by balazs
Not so long ago, a daring fellow named Orville Wright took off from a hazy field in North Carolina with his „homebuilt” airplane. He flew an impressive distance of 39 meters, then landed. That day, the Wright Flyer made four take-offs: the Wright brothers intended to take full advantage of the good weather on their day off.
108 years later, the distances flown in public air transport grew a bit longer, but the overall target of getting the most out of the possibilities hasn’t changed. In the last decades the engineering people of the industry unquestionably did a good job: the equipment is capable of running nearly 24/7. We have got instruments that can land an airplane without any intervention of the flight crew, airport opening hours are driven by the traffic much more than by the weather, moreover, the reliability of ground and in-flight systems is increasing as quickly as their maintenance period does.
There are only two factors of the equation that have remained – and will always remain – constant, and these become the ultimate limits of air transportation capacity. These are the physical space available and the loadability of the human mind.
Space, the first constraint, cannot be outflanked, since there are only two states of a given runway, airport gate or piece of airspace in a given moment: occupied or free. However, along with the evolution of information technology, computers are continuously extending the capacity of the human brain, at least on the level of data storage and organization. In the pre-computerized era, decision making required the talent of complementing the data available with good estimations of the missing information, the aim of IT solutions is to make all relevant information available to get rid of the need for this talent.
From the late 70’s computational data management started to gain growing influence in different fields of airline and airport management. This resulted in discrete, standalone systems that were – if at all – loosely interconnected. The responsible people of the different fields of operation could not complain anymore regarding the lack of data primarily needed for decision making. But regardless of the IT efforts, the delay statistics remained proportional to nothing else but the level of traffic at the best run and equipped airports just as well as at the others without the freshest IT infrastructure.
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The significance of services in TITAN
On 17/06/2011, in TITAN, by steve
As you may have heard, TITAN is an EU 7Th Framework project working on improving the predictability and efficiency of the aircraft turnaround. Its name says it all: turnaround integration in trajectory and network. Building on the baseline to be provided by Airport CDM (A-CDM), TITAN will make the details of the turnaround process more visible on a scale much wider than anything in the past. By providing context sensitive information to the various stakeholders enabling them to anticipate problems and take remedial action not only on a timely basis but also commensurate with the problem to be solved.
You can find more information on TITAN here. This article is about a very important characteristic of TITAN, namely its service oriented architecture (SOA). You can read more about SOA here, but to recap briefly, let me say that in this approach the business aspects and the IT aspects of a system are decoupled from each other, with the business aspects driving the IT aspects and not the other way round. This is a major step in the right direction already as in the past the blessings of modern IT were often negated by the limitations they placed on what the business side was able to achieve. The S in SOA stands for “service” and these are traditionally defined for the IT part of course but even more importantly, the business level also gets its set of services. Where do we get those business services from? Usually they are puzzled out from process models but this can result in an unmanageably complex result. By using domain models to deduce a “what do we actually do” model, things are much simplified and the result is actually usable.
But what does this all have to do with TITAN?
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TITAN Mid-term Progress Meeting
On 10/06/2011, in TITAN, by steve
The mid-term progress meeting of the TITAN project was held on 24-25 May 2011 near Frankfurt at project partner Jeppesen’s European headquarters. The meeting was well attended and was of special significance also on account of the fact that TITAN was introduced for the first time to its new European Commission project officer Mr. Remy Denos.
The meeting took place in the company boardroom, under the watchful eyes of near life-size portraits of Mr. Jeppesen and Mr. Sanderson, the two icons of aeronautical information mapping and management.
Having this meeting at Jeppesen was in part indicative also of the very real progress TITAN was achieving. One of the future deliverables of the project, the TITAN Tool will be created by Jeppesen with input of the project partners of course and the time is now approaching when the tool will become more than just a paper product. Much more in fact. Users of this tool will get a uniquely focused and detailed view of the aircraft ground turnaround process, enabling them to anticipate and mitigate problems that may arise and hence avoid disruptions of the turnaround. A tool that can make this happen can save airlines a lot of money while also benefiting airports and handling organizations.
Of course a lot of work remains.
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TITAN – New category on Roger-Wilco
On 26/05/2011, in TITAN, by steve
Our readers will have noted that Roger-Wilco regularly reports on developments in the field of Collaborative Decision Making (CDM), a subject that has its own category on the blog.
One of the most interesting new developments in CDM is cooking in the EU 7th Framework project TITAN. Building on basic CDM, TITAN brings added value by integrating the aircraft turnaround process into the business trajectory and the ATM network.
In order to give more visibility to TITAN on Roger-Wilco, we are launching an all new category dedicated to the project under the name… well, what did you think? TITAN.
It is our hope that this TITAN space on Roger-Wilco will encourage our readers to comment, ask, explore, criticize or just read about developments in this interesting project.
Of course the official web site of TITAN will continue to be the formal repository of project related information.
IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT TITAN, SAY IT ON ROGER WILCO!
Successful Second Workshop Held by TITAN
On 03/03/2011, in TITAN, by steve
The 7th Framework program TITAN, dealing with optimizing the aircraft turnaround process held its second workshop on 22 February, in Madrid, Spain.
The interest in the subject was amply demonstrated by how well this event was attended at a time when it is not easy to get travel authorization in most organizations. Handling agents, airports, universities, research institutions as well as members of the TITAN team were all well represented and everybody actively contributed to the brainstorming.
The two main themes of the workshop were focusing on the definition and contents of warnings and the information flows and actors concerned.
The program uses a process based, service oriented approach in defining what TITAN will do in order to make actors aware of the progress of the turnaround at a granularity exceeding the currently planned detail and warnings play a crucial role in shaping this common situational awareness. The term “warning” is in fact a generic expression and it covers output generated for information only as well as actual alarms which in turn may be categorized as green (heads-up only, no action), yellow (action to be taken) to red (urgent action to be taken, nominal operation no longer possible). Obviously, getting the trigger events and the warning responses right is crucial for effective operation.
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Second TITAN Workshop – All are welcome!
On 08/02/2011, in TITAN, by steve
Delays in the turnaround are a major cause for low predictability in commercial aviation. The SESAR ConOps describes the paradigm shift towards trajectory based operations. Turnaround Integration into Trajectory And Network (TITAN) extends the view by proposing a concept of operations which integrates the turnaround of aircraft into trajectory and network based on Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) and System Wide Information Management (SWIM) principles. You can read more about TITAN here.
The first TITAN Workshop was held back in March 2010. It was a well attended event that defined the basis of the TITAN concept and provided a first opportunity for all stakeholders to contribute their particular points of view.
The Second TITAN Workshop will be held in Madrid, Spain on 22 February 2011.
Since the start of the project and the First Workshop, a lot of work has been completed, forming the basis of this second meeting to which all interested stakeholders are cordially invited.
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The TITAN project – one year down the road
On 06/12/2010, in TITAN, by steve
I have always wondered whether passengers notice the organized chaos that characterizes aircraft at the gate, getting ready for its next trip. Whether it is a 737 operated by a low-cost carrier getting turned around in as little as 20 minutes or a 747 heading to the other side of the world and readied for departure in less than 90 minutes, the picture is much the same: a lot of machines, a lot of people, a lot of activities which magically all terminate all of a sudden as if on command and the aircraft is ready to go!
This is the turnaround process, one of the most critical phases of a flight. Yes, strange as it may sound, an aircraft on the ground being serviced for its next flight faces many organizational and technical hurdles, the handling of which introduces a degree of unpredictability seldom if ever encountered in actual flight.
Mess up the turnaround process and an immediate delay ensues which can throw the whole schedule of that particular airframe out of whack for the rest of the day. The nightmare of all airlines.
Of course what we see around the aircraft is only part of the show. Inside the terminal scores or hundreds of passengers will be streaming towards their gate and some will stop to shop, some to eat, others just to gape… in any case, their on time arrival at the gate is anything but certain. Another potential source of departure delay…
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TITAN stakeholder workshop – 17 March 2010
On 31/05/2010, in TITAN, by steve
TITAN is an EC 7th Framework project and the acronym stands for “Turnaround Integration in Trajectory and Network”. As its name suggests, TITAN is looking at ways of optimizing the turnaround process while integrating it in trajectory based, net-centric operations.
The Workshop held in Brussels on 17 March 2010 had two objectives: on the one hand it presented the project to the community and on the other it collected stakeholders’ needs and requirements in the context of the turnaround process. All the actors (airspace users, airports, ANSPs and handling companies) who would be affected by the new TITAN concept had been invited to attend the workshop and the turn-out was very good. It was therefore possible to capture their daily concerns, needs and proposals in a representative manner.
The format chosen for the workshop was that of focused brainstorming with selected facilitators making sure that the time and scope objectives were observed. As it turned out, the format was very successful and participants contributed actively in the general sessions as well as in the group sessions.
The introductory session
Work started with an introduction of the project followed by the SESAR Joint Undertaking giving an overview of their main activities in the context of turnaround and the input they expected from TITAN to fill the gaps identified in the relevant parts of the SESAR work packages.
Next, an analysis of the current situation was presented, highlighting the potential bottlenecks. An initial turnaround model was also sketched to seed and start the discussions.
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First TITAN Workshop – Brussels 17 March 2010
On 07/04/2010, in TITAN, by steve
TITAN, the EC 7th Framework project focusing on optimizing the turnaround process, held its first Workshop on 17 March. The purpose of the Workshop was to collect information on the turnaround as it is to-day, make an inventory of the problems and develop initial thoughts about possible solutions.
There was a good turnout, with airlines, airports, handling companies and ATC all represented. EUROCONTROL was there and the SESAR Joint Undertaking was also represented on the expert level.
The workshop was run very effectively using a formula that kept everyone busy and eager to contribute to the discussion.
The new TITAN brochure, seen already the week before at ATC Global in Amsterdam, was also available to participants of the Workshop to take with them and spread the news about TITAN.
We will be bringing you a more detailed account of the Workshop once the results have been analyzed and the conclusions formulated. Watch this space!
TITAN Kicks into high gear
On 08/12/2009, in TITAN, by steve
After several months of careful preparation, TITAN, a project in the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme, kicked
into high gear on 3 December 2009 when the TITAN Consortium held the kick-off meeting at INECO’s premises in Madrid.
The name TITAN stands for “Turn-round Integration in Trajectory and Network”. The project will analyze the aircraft turn-round process with a view to identifying opportunities for improvements as well as to pinpoint the influence of external actors and processes like passenger flow and baggage handling. The improved turn-round process will be modeled and validated and a decision support tool will be developed suitable for use by different partners, enabling them to manage the turn-round process more efficiently. This will be achieved primarily by providing predictive, common awareness of all the relevant influences, including those coming from the airport land-side.
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