User-centric Cost-based Flight Efficiency and Equity indicators

Flight efficiency is a generic term that varies depending on the agent’s viewpoint. Whereas Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) take a wider look at efficiency, considering components such as sector capacity, air traffic controller’s interventions, emissions and noise; airlines are mainly concerned on costs, i.e. fuel consumption and schedule adherence. It is important to bring these two agents’ viewpoints together in new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to capture airspace users’ needs without leaving out the inefficiencies of the entire net. The current implementation of efficiency measurement (as defined in the SES Performance Scheme) affects the ANSPs view on efficiency since the ANSPs have to report on specific KPIs to evaluate their performance and management of the air traffic. This implementation takes into consideration only the horizontal portion of the flight, measuring the excess horizontal en-route distance compared to the orthodromic. This approach lacks of important information for airspace users’ objectives since it leaves out the vertical component of the flight or wind conditions. In order to introduce the airspace users’ objectives into the global net efficiency measurement, it is key to develop advanced metrics that consider fuel consumption, schedule adherence and cost of flights. These new efficiency metrics require the design of user-preferred trajectories as the main references for performance comparison purposes. Additionally, airspace users are claiming for equity metrics showing how these inefficiencies are distributed between them in certain areas such as FIRs or city-pairs. This paper presents the methodology followed for the design of advanced user-centric cost-based efficiency and equity indicators as well as a flight efficiency and equity assessment of the European traffic flow in two particular days in February 2017 taking into consideration the airspace users’ perspective. This research was conducted under the AURORA project (Grant 699340) supported by SESAR Joint Undertaking under European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. AURORA aims to propose new metrics to assess the operational efficiency of the ATM system and to measure how fairly the inefficiencies in the system are distributed among the different airlines. The AURORA consortium is formed by Centro de Referencia I+D+i ATM (CRIDA), Boeing Research and Technology Europe (BR&TE), Centre for Applied Data Analytics Research (CeADAR) and Flight Radar 24 (FR24) with the support of Iberia, Air Europa, KLM and Turkish Airlines as members of the AURORA’s Airspace Users Group. Keywords-component; Airlines; ANSP; Flight Efficiency; KPI; Air Traffic Management; SESAR; ADS-B.