Validation is a key stage in the development of new Air Traffic Management (ATM) concepts. MAEVA work has proven to be relevant and beneficial for the validation of the concepts under study in the INTENT project.

The MAEVA methodology should ideally be applied from the proposal phase of a validation project on. With INTENT this has not been done, nevertheless, the overall approach within the project allowed an application afterwards. This is because MAEVA mainly affects the validation exercises that were to be performed within INTENT; which were not planned with great detail in the INTENT proposal. As a result, the validation process of INTENT consisted of four (validation) exercises:

• A literature study.
• A real-time part-task simulation.
• A fast-time simulation.
• A real-time full simulation.

The literature study was executed within INTENT in the “identification” phase. The main objective of this phase was to refine the scope of the project, survey relevant activities, projects, initiatives, etc. relevant for INTENT, investigate the stakeholders interests in the traffic separation assurance process and identify potential benefits of an improved ATM system. Moreover, an extensive capacity study was performed in this phase, in which reasons for capacity limitations for the present system were studied, capacity metrics were defined and theoretical maximum capacity was investigated.

The MAEVA validation guidelines were taken into account at the level of the experiment design. The validation road map is based on the following sequence of three simulations, which has been applied to both ground and airborne operational concepts:

• real-time part-task simulations, to develop workload models and assess acceptability of concepts incorporating aircraft intent,
• fast-time simulations, to generate significant data over a larger airspace,
• full-scale real-time simulations to validate the part-task and fast-time results.

• Separation Assurance Concept


The following operational concepts, including the location of the separation assurance task and airspace structure, are defined:

• Ground-based separation assurance with structured airspace (fixed routes)
• Ground-based separation assurance with unstructured airspace (free routes)
• Airborne traffic separation assurance with unstructured airspace (free routes)

In all concepts, Reduced Vertical Separation Minima (RVSM) were assumed and Special Use Airspace (SUA) was partially active during the experiments.


• Aircraft Intent Information Level
  
  Aircraft intent information has been defined as the path in time-space that the aircraft intends to fly. Four levels of intent information were assumed:
• no intent, only aircraft position and state information (5 min look-ahead time)
• intent with 5 min look-ahead time
• intent  with 10 min look-ahead time
• intent with 20 min look-ahead time

• Traffic Load
  
  Traffic samples for use in the simulations were produced according to the Eurocontrol's CARE INTEGRA Project method. The baseline traffic data in INTENT consisted of flight plan data from Eurocontrol’s Central Flow Management Unit (CFMU) for a six-week period in 2000. Traffic samples were created for traffic density 1, 1.3, 1.5, 1.7, 2, 3, 4 and 6. In these traffic samples, all traffic avoided the active SUAs.
  
  
  

Details of validation approach can be found in D2-2.