AEON is a European project funded by SESAR Joint Undertaking that aims at innovating airport ground operations with more environmentally friendly taxiing techniques for the aviation sector.
This project In particular it aims to define a concept of operations for engine-off taxiing techniques, making use of novel technologies that are coming onto the market, such as Taxi Bots, E-Taxi and Single Engine Taxiing.
The variety of engine off taxiing techniques envisioned by the AEON project will impact current taxi operations from the strategical planning of the operations to the way traffic is managed on taxiways and how aircraft navigate through airport locations. For instance, the maximum speed limit of electric taxi technologies may impact the airport ground traffic flow. Also, the integration of more tugs for towing aircraft on taxiways will intensify the already dense traffic impacting controllers’ and pilots’ activities.
Therefore, the project considers a « taxiing supervision » role in the tower that could either be a dedicated controller or an additional role to the ground control. The activities of the « taxi supervisor » will be to fluidify the taxiing operations by taking into account the characteristics of each vehicle, manage fleets of additional vehicles such as electric tugs. We aim to identify the impacts on how such a new role will impact the workflow of existing stakeholders and design and evaluate new tools to provide collaborative means to reduce airport pollution and optimise the traffic flow on airport taxiways.
The AEON project will provide collaborative tools to support controllers, pilots, airport groundling services and airport companies to make airport taxiing more sustainable while retaining current airport safety and capacity levels.
Website: https://www.aeon-project.eu
