EU CO-FUNDED PROGRAMMES

AIA’s evolution into a high-performing node within the European Air Traffic Management network

The European Commission has approved co-funding Athens International Airport S.A. (AIA) for the implementation of the “Evolution into a high-performing node within the European Air Traffic Management Network”. It is the first time that a Greek airport is being selected by the EU under the programme of “Connecting Europe Facility – Transport Sector” (Action no 2017-EL-TM-0158-W), which concerns EU's priority for the creation of the “Single European Sky” (SESAR).

The objective of this grant is to enable Athens Airport to develop and implement new and advanced concepts for airport operations, airport resources management and information sharing in order to enhance its operational efficiency in the serving of the traffic and make optimum use of the available capacity on ground and in the air. Operational information from all collaborating parties will be integrated and made available to all stakeholders in real time as well as ex post (in reports), while new functionalities will be implemented, in line with the emerging airport needs and the latest international airports trends and best practices, thus addressing the increasing operational and quality standards of AIA.

The Programme will be implemented through six interrelated projects extending over a five-year period (2019-2023). Expected benefits for passengers, AIA, the airport community, the Mesogaia region and the Hellenic economy include reductions of flight delays, taxi-out time savings, reduction of the environmental footprint (fuel consumption and reduction of CO₂ emissions), increased operational predictability and improved overall passenger experience. Furthermore, the implementation of this programme will contribute to enhanced overall efficiency/performance of the European Air Traffic Management Network.

Co-financed by the Connecting Europe
Facility of the European Union

AIA's innovation - R&D activities

In January 2023 AIA joined a consortium of 23 partners from 6 different countries (Italy, Greece, Spain, Romania, Belgium, and UK) in a project entitled TrialsNet (TRials Supported by Smart Networks Beyond 5G).

TrialsNet vision is to enable the realization of compelling societal values through the implementation of 5G and beyond applications, which will be propaedeutic for the transition towards the next generation of mobile networks. Based on this, TrialsNet will deploy full large-scale trials to implement a heterogenous and comprehensive set of innovative 6G applications based on various technologies such as Cobots, Metaverse, massive twinning, Internet of Senses, and others, covering the three relevant domains of the urban ecosystems in Europe identified as i) Infrastructure, Transportation, Security & Safety, ii) eHealth & Emergency, and iii) Culture, Tourism & Entertainment”.

AIA is particularly interested in addressing the challenge to protect and safeguard the lives and the safety of the tens of thousands of passengers using the airport every day but also ensuring their enhanced experience. To this end, the results of the TrialsNet project will provide:

a solution for proactive infrastructure management i.e. real-time virtual representation of the infrastructures through digital twins, live bilateral communication with workers, and alerts in case of failures and security breaches are predicted;
solution for autonomous and optimal operations in APRON through robots, VR, etc. and
service robots for enhanced passengers experience and personalized services throughout their journey.

More info @ https://trialsnet.eu/

PISTIS is a European funded project that aims to develop a reference federated data sharing/trading and monetisation platform for secure, trusted and controlled exchange and usage of proprietary data assets and data-driven intelligence. The project started in January 2023 and will last until June 2026.

The mobility and urban planning demonstrator (Hub #1), which is led by AIA will focus on facilitating data trading and sharing amongst stakeholders of different sectors (aviation, public transports, public administration) which can be considered as key actors of a value chain that can be built around mobility and urban planning data.

In this demonstrator, such actors are already collaborating, however not in the frame of an integrated value chain whose exploitation can lead to significant benefits for all, and generate new revenue streams, both within the value chain, but also with external actors that can consume insights.

More specifically, the demonstrator includes AIA (Athens International Airport), GOLDAIR (Ground Handling Service Provider), OASA (Athens Public Transportation System, including bus and metro lines) and DAEM (City of Athens IT Company), that act as data consumers and/or providers depending on the use case. Data coming from OAG (aviation data marketplace), as well as weather data from UBIMET, that act as data brokers, will be also leveraged.

More info @ Homepage - PISTIS (pistis-project.eu)

Athens International Airport S.A. (AIA) joined a consortium of 19 organizations from 9 different countries in a project entitled ALBATROS. This Horizon Innovation Action, which started in November 2022, will create a concept for the real-time sharing of safety information with aviation stakeholder in order to improve survivability of passengers, cabin crew, aircraft and infrastructure. To this, the Consortium takes into account new risks and technologies that may impact current and future aviation operations.

For four years, ALBATROS will consider risks related to new hazards in aviation and new types of aircraft technology. The Consortium will also weigh the impact of climate change on airports, the risks associated with new fuels and energy sources (e.g., electric powertrains and hydrogen-powered aircraft), and cybersecurity incidents. The researches will run parallel with the proposals of decisive solutions to increase overall aviation safety, encompassing passengers, aircraft, and airport infrastructures.

AIA as an airport operator will contribute to the concept actions as well as will provide its critical infrastructure in order the project research outputs to be demonstrated and evaluated.

More info @ https://www.albatros-horizon.eu/

Launched in October 2022, EU-CIP is an EU-funded project under Horizon Europe (GA ID: 101073878) which brings together 20 partners under the coordination of Engineering Spa to establish a novel pan European knowledge network for Resilient Infrastructures.

EU-CIP will thus enable policy makers to shape and produce data-driven evidence-based policies, while boosting the innovation capacity of Critical Infrastructures (CI) operators, authorities, and innovators (including SMEs). In this direction, EU-CIP partners have already established the European Cluster for Securing Critical infrastructures (ECSCI), which brings together 31 projects that collaborate in CI Resilience.

EU-CIP will leverage the achievements of the ECSCI cluster to establish an EU-wide knowledge network with advanced analytical and innovation support capabilities.

AIA will contribute to the project’s activities as an air transport operator and authority. In this capacity, it will support information data collection, information analysis and ecosystem building activities.

More info @ https://www.eucip.eu/

AIA joined a consortium of 18 organizations from 7 different countries in a project entitled FORFREIGHT - Flexible, multi-mοdal and Robust FREIGHT Transport.

The primary objective of the project is to optimize the utilization of multimodal freight transport capacity and reduce the average cost of freight transport. To achieve this, the project aims to develop innovative solutions that will enhance the management of airports, ports, inland terminals and other logistics nodes flows, ultimately leading to more efficient freight transport.

Expected benefits:

Live Cargo location and status monitoring (temp, humidity, etc.)
Realistic and accurate ETA to all intermediate points
Reduction of delivery times through the better coordination of the individual stakeholder systems
Decision Support System (DSS) suggestions regarding the needed resources (staff, equipment, vehicles, storage spaces etc.) at all intermediate points

AIA will offer operational expertise and an operational airport environment for the conduction of the real-life trials. AIA will facilitate the provision of the Greek Use Case partners requirements for the development of the project tools and methods and will contribute to the design and implementation of the related validation scenarios. Finally, AIA will evaluate the results of the validation scenarios and attest the outcomes of the project.

More info @ Home - FOR FREIGHT (for-freight.eu)

AIA joined a consortium of 22 partners in a project entitled STARGATE: SusTainable AiRports, the Green heArT of Europe which commenced November 1^st 2021 and will last for five (5) years. The project aims to support the European Green Deal and to reduce carbon emissions from aviation as well as its overall environmental impact. AIA will be able to push its ambitious environmental agenda forward, in particular its efforts to decarbonize its operations in relation to its Route 2025 initiative but also to engage other members of the Airport community towards a more sustainable aviation ecosystem.

More info @ https://www.greendealstargate.eu

AIA joined a consortium of 40 partners from 11 different countries in a project entitled PRECINCT - Preparedness and Resilience Enforcement for Critical INfrastructure Cascading Cyberphysical Threats and effects with focus on district or regional protection.

PRECINCT project aims to connect EU Critical Infrastructure (CI) stakeholders in a geographical area to a common cyber-physical security management approach which will yield a protected territory for citizens and infrastructures, a ‘PRECINCT’ that can be replicated efficiently for a safer Europe.

AIA will test and evaluate the PRECINCT platform in terms of increasing the resilience of interconnected CIs with the metro and highway connecting the Athens International Airport with metropolitan area of Athens (rail and road network along the Athens Airport / Attiki Odos corridor as well as along the urban rail network).

More info @ https://www.precinct.info/en. View here the Press Release.

AIA actively participates in the BRIDGES H2020 project since its official start in October 2020.

BRIDGES - a hyBRID (physical-diGital) multi-user Extended reality platform as a stimulus for industry uptake of interactive technologieS - project proposes to bring a holistic solution to the market for (remote and co-located) group interaction in room-scale immersive eXtended Reality (XR) environments that blend the physical and virtual space.

The project will carry out extensive and comprehensive studies to validate the proposed solution in realistic operational conditions, focusing and piloting on the areas of industrial training and informal learning/edutainment. The project will validate its outcome with real world settings of major international airports in Germany and Greece for firefighters’ training. AIA will test and demonstrate the concept effectiveness of the pilot for the Rescue & Firefighting Services (RFFS).

More info @ BRIDGES H2020 european project | Bridges Horizon EU (bridges-horizon.eu)

AIA actively participates in the FORESIGHT EU project since its official start in in October 2019. The FORESIGHT project aims to develop a federated cyber-range solution to enhance the preparedness of cybersecurity professionals at all levels and advance their skills towards preventing, detecting, reacting and mitigating sophisticated cyber-attacks. This is achieved by delivering an ecosystem of networked realistic training and simulation platforms that collaboratively bring unique cyber-security aspects from the aviation, smart grid and naval domains.

AIA as a key partner will contribute to the design and implementation of the information security related validation scenarios and will evaluate the tools and methods developed throughout FORESIGHT project.

More info @ https://foresight-h2020.eu/

AIA actively participates in the 5G-TOURS EU project since its official start in June 2019. The project will deploy full end-to-end trials to bring 5G to real users for thirteen representative use cases.

The project will provide efficient and reliable close-to-commercial services for tourists, citizens and patients in three different types of cities:

Rennes, the safe city where e-health use cases will be demonstrated;
Turin, the touristic city focused on media and broadcast use cases;
Athens, the mobility-efficient city that brings 5G to users in motion as well as to transport-related service providers.

AIA is leading two use cases - airport evacuation use case and video-enhanced ground-based vehicles with live video feeds from Cameras installed on AIA’s Follow-Me Vehicles – and participating in the smart parking management use case.

More info @ https://5gtours.eu/

AIA joined a consortium of 18 organizations from 10 different countries in a project entitled SATIE - Security of Air Transport Infrastructure of Europe. SATIE aims at improving the cyber & physical security resilience of European airports. SATIE adopts a holistic approach about threat prevention, detection, response and mitigation in airports, while guaranteeing the protection of critical systems, sensitive data and passengers.

The proposed solution combines an interoperable toolkit that improves cyber-physical correlations, forensics investigations and dynamic impact assessment and has the ability to counteract new, complex cyber-physical threats that airports are currently facing. Finally, SATIE paves the way to a new generation of Security Operations Centre (SOC) that has been included in a comprehensive airport security policy. The applicability of the project results to real-life scenarios have been validated through three demonstrations to be held at different corners of Europe (Croatia, Italy and Greece).

More info @ http://satie-h2020.eu/

AIA actively participates in the ICARUS EU project since January 2018. ICARUS aims to deliver a novel framework and architecture that leverages data from diverse sources which is primarily or secondarily related to the aviation industry, in order to help companies and organisations whose operations are directly or indirectly linked to aviation gain a deeper insight into features of flights, airports and passengers and improve their operations.

Sophisticated passenger handling mechanisms
and personalised services on ground facilities
will be implemented by AIA.

More info @ https://www.icarus2020.aero/

AIA participates in the Horizon 2020 CHARIOT project for the promotion of Privacy, Security and Safety of IoT Systems, initiated in January 2018. CHARIOT will advance cutting edge technology by providing a design method and a cognitive computing platform that will support a unified approach to Privacy, Security and Safety (PSS) of IoT Systems. This approach places devices and hardware at the root of trust, in turn contributing to heightened security and integrity of industrial IoT.

AIA’s role is to coordinate all activities towards the implementation of Living Lab 3. LL3 aims at addressing safety of airport Infrastructures, enhancing protection of Athens Airport’s facilities from physical and cyber threats. To achieve this, CHARIOT will enhance the ability of airports to timely detect or even and predict hazardous situations, while at the same time reducing false alarms that disrupt airport operations.

More info @ www.chariotproject.eu

AIA actively participates in the Transforming Transport EU project since its official start in January 2017. The project will present in a realistic, measurable, and replicable way transformations that Big Data will bring to the transportation and logistics markets.
AIA holds a key role in the “Efficient Air Transport” pilot, which aims to optimise the Operations Management. Utilising Big Data technology will identify passengers’ behavioural patterns, and help predict the time of passengers’ arrival and the way through which they will cross the terminal, thus aiding allocation of required resources in critical areas at all times and reducing operational costs.

More info @ http://www.transformingtransport.eu/

INTERACTION was a European Commission FP7 project which started on October 1^st, 2013 and ended on March 30^th, 2016. Project INTERACTION aimed at proposing new procedures, technologies and tools for enhancing time-efficient turnaround airport operations by looking for improvements in each process individually, as well as an overall coordinated way with common goals, such as minimizing the global turnaround time and reducing the effects of perturbations that may appear in any of the airport sub-processes during turnaround. This research extended to the ground side existing concepts developed for the airside in related European research programmes as SESAR.

More info: INnovative TEchnologies and Researches for a new Airport Concept towards Turnaround coordinatION | INTERACTION | Project | Fact sheet | FP7 | CORDIS | European Commission (europa.eu)

IM@GINE IT was a European Commission FP5 project which started on September 1^st, 2001 and ended on August 31^st, 2003. Project IM@GINE IT aimed at developing one and single access point through which the end user can obtain location-based, intermodal transport information (static and dynamic), mapping and routing, navigation and other related services everywhere in Europe, anytime, taking into account personal preferences of the user. Thus, IM@GINE IT targeted at the facilitation of seamless travel in Europe and intended to become a universal platform, covering urban, interurban and crossborder areas.

More Info: Interfacing Mobile Applications with Voice Natural Language Interface | IMAGINE | Project | Fact sheet | FP5 | CORDIS | European Commission (europa.eu)

eVACUATE was a European Commission FP5 project which started on April 1^st, 2013 and ended on May 21^st, 2017. Project eVACUATE aimed at developing a holistic, scenario-independent, situation-awareness and guidance system for sustaining the Active Evacuation Route for large crowds. A service-oriented Decision-Support System was developed to dynamically distribute on-demand evacuation information to emergency management actors as the crisis unfolds. In eVACUATE, the intelligent fusion of sensors, geospatial and contextual information, with advanced multi-scale crowd behaviour detection and recognition was developed. Smart spaces of electronic, audio and other mobile devices were connected to the integrated system to provide safer evacuation routings for people.

More Info: A holistic, scenario-independent, situation-awareness and guidance system for sustaining the Active Evacuation Route for large crowds | EVACUATE | Project | Fact sheet | FP7 | CORDIS | European Commission (europa.eu)

EUROSKY was a European Commission FP7 project which started on May 1^st, 2013 and ended on April 30^th, 2017. Project EUROSKY aimed at delivering a high impact programme for advanced air-cargo security and facilitation measures to safeguard international supply chains and the security of citizens while fostering international co-operation and a broad stakeholder engagement from all segments of the air-cargo industry.

More Info: Single European Secure Air-cargo Space | EUROSKY | Project | Fact sheet | FP7 | CORDIS | European Commission (europa.eu)

PROSPERO was a European Commission FP7 project which started on November 1^st, 2012 and ended on October 31^st, 2015. Project PROSPERO aimed at developing, implementing and evaluating a prototype management system for identifying and actively managing systemic risks in the Air Transport. PROSPERO delivered a common operational concept of performance indicators linked to operational goals, a methodology for operational system analysis, a new taxonomy to encompass all aviation socio-technical system concepts, a generic system-risk-management process involving all stakeholders and a software system to support the socio-technical analysis and redesign of the ATS.

More Info: PROactive Safety PERformance for Operations | PROSPERO | Project | Fact sheet | FP7 | CORDIS | European Commission (europa.eu)

ASK-IT was a European Commission FP7 project which started on October 1st, 2004 and ended on September 30th, 2008. Project ASK-IT aimed at establishing Ambient Intelligence (Ami) in semantic web enabled services, in supporting and promoting the mobility of the Mobility Impaired people, enabling the provision of personalised, self-configurable, intuitive and context-related applications and services and facilitating knowledge and content organisation and processing.

ASP-NET was a European Commission FP5 project which started on October 1^st, 2004 and ended on September 30^th, 2008. Project ASP-NET aimed at developing an ASP network, which provided sophisticated resources and services for applications that have become critical to the successful operation of today's organisations. The integration platform constituted the operation and management infrastructure that enabled the integration and interoperability of separate online applications. This was achieved through the extensive use of XML-based standards and adoption of the Web services concept for the development of Product Services Systems (PSS).

More Info: Application service providers network | ASP-NET | Project | Fact sheet | FP5 | CORDIS | European Commission (europa.eu)

ADAMANT was a European Commission FP5 project which started on March 1^st, 2002 and ended on February 29^th, 2004. Project ADAMANT aimed at providing a wireless-based intelligent communication and decision support system for transport and travellers. The approach was generic covering any mode of transport (e.g. rail, road and air), although within the project, it was limited to airports. The system was capable of handling adequately operating under civilian emergency or crises situations.

POMPEI which started on September 1^st, 2004 and ended on February 28^th, 2007. Project POMPEI aimed at developing an integrated architecture and a suite of mobile applications for advanced services, at assisting mobile teams of safety/security and emergency response workers in crisis management and responsing during an emergency situation. The system used advanced techniques in peer-to-peer workflow management, integrated with location and presence services, operating transparently on several wide area and local wireless networks, to allow resilient communication on infrastructure.

More Info: P2P location and presence mobile services for managing crisis and disaster situations | POMPEI | Project | Fact sheet | FP6 | CORDIS | European Commission (europa.eu)

TASS was a European Commission FP7 project which started on April 1^st, 2010 and ended on March 31^st, 2014. Project TASS aimed at creating an entire airport security intelligence solution, providing real-time accurate situational awareness to airport authorities. The TASS concept was based on integrating and fusing different types of selected real time sensors and sub-systems for data collection in a variety of modes, including fixed and mobile, all suitable for operation under any environmental condition.

SMS was a European Commission FP6 project which started on June 1^st, 2006 and ended on November 30^th, 2008. Project SMS aimed at creating innovative tools enabling a new class of services, addressing the specific needs of mobile users and enabling individuals and small businesses to become service providers. If mobile services are to repeat the success of the Web, they have to be simple to find, simple to use, simple to trust and simple to set up. These were the design goals for SMS. Like the Web, SMS provided technology and operator-independent end-to-end connectivity. But unlike conventional Web-based services SMS targeted specific locations visited by specific classes of mobile user with specific needs.

ASSET was a European Commission FP7 project which started on June 1^st, 2008 and ended on November 11^th, 2011. Project ASSET aimed at developing and assessing solutions for airport process improvement in terms of time efficiency regarding both, passenger process and aircraft turnaround in an integrated approach. Therefore, representatives of nearly all directly or indirectly involved stakeholders (airports, airlines, aircraft manufacturers, technological suppliers, security service providers etc.) gathered to work conjointly on this project.

L4S was a European Commission FP7 project which started on July 1^st, 2009 and ended on July 31^th, 2011. Project L4S aimed at providing a clear understanding and further developing existing know-how, in both interdisciplinary scientific / academic models and best / worst practices and experiences in the field of transportation. It focused on the factors inhibiting effective collaboration dynamics in crises and leading to the failure of effective crisis management and of the interventions required to reduce these risks.

 