Contract-based Air Transportation System (CATS)

The Frequentis AG with headquarters in Vienna, Austria, has been active for more than 50 years in the development and delivery of products for Air Traffic Control (ATC) and the broader aeronautical market.

The activities cover self-financed R&D and marketing of systems and products for this specific market.

Frequentis core activities lay in aeronautical communication and information systems. The company expertise covers both technological and operational aspects of the whole tactical aeronautical communications chain (voice switch, airborne and ground radio technologies, supporting functions).

In the CATS Consortium, Frequentis will act as the project co-ordinator and provides project management expertise as well as sound knowledge in workflow management and CDM.

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In the CATS Consortium, EUROCONTROL is represented by the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre (EEC).

EUROCONTROL has extensive ATM/CNS expertise dedicated to the improvement of ATM. The participation of EUROCONTROL in the CATS Project is intended to focus the project on operational and technical improvements and capabilities that can realistically been visaged in operational systems by 2020, to provide a neutral and European-wide operational concept for the 2020 horizon, to gain a broader audience and support for the project, to guarantee full alignment with the objectives of the Single Sky and the ACARE and SESAR initiatives, and to guarantee comprehensive integration of ground and airborne efforts.

EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre assigns effort mostly to the concept of operation definition and assessment and will actively participate in dissemination.

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The Air France Group has 70 years of experience in the aviation business and includes 20 subsidiaries specialised in numerous fields of the air transport business.

The Air France Group is represented in the CATS Consortium by Air France Consulting (AFC). The work is focused on Target Window (TW) modelling. Furthermore, AFC will deploy operational experts, who are skilled to define the operational concept scenario for the Contract of Objectives (CoO) and the various hypotheses required for validation by Human-in-the-Loop (HIL) experiments. Moreover, AFC will involve professional pilots in the experiments, and will validate the proposed concept.

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The core unit of Airport Operation is the Airport Steering Room from where Unique manages the daily airport operation together with the two handling companies, the hub carrier Swiss and the police. All operational data are shared among the participants and decisions are taken together with the partners involved. Because of this CDM (Collaborative Decision Making) approach, Zurich Airport was nominated as "first CDM airport of Europe" by EUROCONTROL after having successfully completed 2 of the 4 stages in EUROCONTROL's CDM program in 2005. The completion of stages 3 and 4 is planned for 2006.

The main benefits of CDM for Zurich are improved cooperation with all partners resulting in an impressive improvement in punctuality and quality. In order to extend CDM beyond the borders of Zurich Airport, Unique is looking for partners to exchange know-how and data to improve traffic flow and thus the operational efficiency and quality.

Given its leading position in Europe in the CDM initiative, Unique will provide know-how and experience in airport operations and collaborative mechanisms and provide valuable input to the definition of the CoO, in terms of the evaluation to be made in the last HIL experiment (i.e. the renegotiation collaborative mechanism).

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The International Institute of Air and Space Law of the University of Leiden is one of the leading international scientific research and teaching institutes in the world, specialised in legal and policy issues regarding aviation and space activities. It was founded by the Faculty of Law of Leiden University in 1986. Its objective is to contribute to the development of aviation and space law and policy by: conducting and promoting research; issuing publications; giving advice to interested parties; teaching at graduate and post-graduate level; creating a centre of up-to-date information; promoting the safe, economic and sound operation of international air transport services and space activities.

The International Institute of Air and Space Law works on the legal assessment issues generally and is involved in the establishment of the legal framework to draw up a Contract of Objectives.

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The "Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule", Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich) is a community of 20,000 people from 80 nations who study, do research or are employed there. Around 360 lecturers in 15 departments teach mainly in the technical, mathematical and natural science areas and carry out research which is highly valued worldwide. ETH Zurich was founded in 1855 as the "Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum" (Federal Polytechnic Institute). At that time, as the "child" of the new federal government, it was the only national university in Switzerland. Today, ETH Zurich, EPF Lausanne and four research institutions have been linked together to form the national ETH domain. The CATS team members for ETH will be based in the Department of Electrical Engineering, in particular the Institute for Automation.

ETH Zurich will work on the safety and risk issues and will be involved in concept of operation definition as well as in setting-up the assessment hypotheses.

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In recent years, ORTS has carried out economic studies related to ATM. Since early 2003, ORTS has been collaborating with the EUROCONTROL CEATS Research, Development and Simulation Centre in Budapest, Hungary, to provide a conceptual framework supporting decision-making bodies in establishing the route charging policy when cross-border upper airspace, such as CEATS, is envisaged as a possible charging volume of airspace. The results of this study were published in the November 2005 issue of the Journal of Air Transport Management. ORTS is currently defining charging policies and assessing the economic sustainability of the BLUE MED Functional Airspace Block.

University of Trieste, represented by the "Laboratorio di Ricerca Operativa" will work on the cost-benefit assessment issues and will be involved in concept of operation definition as well as in setting up the assessment hypotheses.

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The L'Società Ente Nazionale per l'Assistenza al Volo (ENAV SpA) is the Italian Agency for Air Navigation Services. ENAV SpA participates in and actively contributes to several international projects, committees, working groups, expert panels dealing with CNS/ATM matters. R&D projects and activities are aimed to CNS/ATM systems pre-operational implementation and to technical co-operation with international organisation and foreign countries for advise, training, joint-committees.

ENAV can strongly contribute to the validation objectives within this project taking into account its operational experience of managing air traffic within the Mediterranean Area, and its experimental facilities that has been exploited in several EC Framework Programme projects. ENAV is strongly committed in ATS R&D tasks like the definition of new traffic optimisation tools to allow increasing in capacity, having to front daily problems related to the increasing of traffic. ENAV will contribute to the workshops with ATCOs and R&D experts and to the simulations performed by EUROCONTROL.

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SkySoft ATM's mission is to provide leading-edge ATC solutions. Our present ATC market is largely due to the high level of expertise of our staff both in IT related subject as well as in Air Traffic Control operations and environment.

Over the years SkySoft-ATM has developed a significant expertise in building simulation software and conducting simulations (Real time and fast time simulations). The most significant one being probably the Fasti Real Time simulation demonstrating a cross border use of MTCD, SYSCO and Mona tools. This simulation is part of Eurocontrol's Fasti program and involves several stakeholders as for example Skyguide and ENAV.

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