A few words from the Project Co-ordinator

Welcome to the Episode 3 website. I work at the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre in Brétigny (FR) as the Project Co-ordinator of this European Commission-funded project, which gathers the key players in European ATM research (22 partners to date) to support the SESAR initiative.

This project was approved to begin in April 2007, at which time the SESAR concept was still being debated between the various groups of stakeholders.  It took a good half year to come up with a stable and accepted concept on which Episode 3 could focus.

Our project was therefore re-aligned to this concept and to the implementation path that was drawn up to lead to this concept.  A consensus emerged that we should concentrate on the 2nd implementation package, targeting the 2020 timeframe.

However, as our scope was being finally agreed, it became clear by looking at the work program being designed for the SESAR Joint Undertaking, that our work program was not optimised.  The European Commission therefore asked us to re-assess our plans, in order to optimise our input to the SESAR development phase.

This work has been done between April and July 2008, and we are now restarting a completely revamped project, 16 months after the official kick off.

The project has been refocused and will now be completed by the end of 2009, with a trimmed-down budget of €19 M.

There has been a tremendous effort on the part of the project partners in order to address our new challenge, which I see as to 'dry-run' a full concept validation by selecting a few focus areas and to develop a framework that is able to gather all validation results in a performance-driven approach.

Acknowledging the low maturity of the SESAR concept at this stage, our validation emphasis is on the following areas:

• Clarification of the concept, on selected concept elements
• Testing new cost-effective validation techniques (small scale prototyping sessions, gaming exercises, expert workshops) that seem more suited in these early stages of validation
• Consolidation of our learning on the application of E-OCVM to large scale CONOPS
• Bringing together validation results in a series of ‘cases’: performance, safety and environment.

The challenge is enormous but we have assembled the best European experts in ATM validation for this project and we are determined to succeed!

Philippe Leplae
Episode 3 Project Co-ordinator