Scientific and technological approach

The main target of ISMAEL is to improve safety and efficiency for ground movements in air transportation. Therefore a new detector technology shall be developed and integrated into advanced surface movement guidance and control systems (ASMGCS). On this basis ISMAEL aims at improving existing installations of ASMGCS at large airports as well as enabling the installation of appropriate ASMGCS at small and medium airports in Europe.

  1. Capture the requirements for an effective and usable system from a technical (e.g. functional, performance and safety), economic (e.g. equipment, installation and operational costs) and legal (e.g. liability, safety regulations) point of view. It is important to understand the demands for such a system and in particular the levels of performance and dependability required to support the functions that operational users require.
  2. Develop appropriate hardware prototypes for magnetic field sensors and investigate the theoretical fundamentals of the physical phenomenon of magneto resistant materials. Special attention will be given to model the excitation of the sensor signals due to vehicles passing the sensor and to suppress disturbing influences from environmental conditions or sources.
  3. Develop and apply complex algorithms for the necessary data processing that are capable to detect and identify vehicles and provide important parameters about their motion, like velocity, direction, etc. This stage of the development embeds the sensor head into a complete detector module.
  4. Investigate the Integration of the developed detector module into complete systems for airport applications by combining the detector with other information sources like radar and flight data etc. to explore the potential benefits of the new technology for enhancements of existing systems as well as for new systems.
  5. Establish how this new detector technology is able to satisfy the requirements, through practical experiments and trials in an airport environment, to assess where further work or investigation is required and to provide assurance that no insurmountable problems exist.
  6. Provide a socio-economic evaluation of the impacts of the system on users and society in general as well as of the costs and benefits of the system, in particular against the requirements of smaller regional airports which are experiencing traffic growth as the traditional major airports reach saturation level.
  7. Establish a well-founded strategy for further development towards marketable products. Identify market opportunities and barriers, assess the technical and economical potential and develop implementation and exploitation strategies for the most promising applications, with special emphasis on safety related applications.

Thus ISMAEL will be a major contribution to overcome existing operational limits of small and medium airports and strengthen their competitiveness by improving safety standards and capacity. Large airports will also benefit from ISMAEL, by gaining flexibility for the augmentation of existing A-SMGCS to raise their capacity.