ITACA

ITACA seeks to accelerate the development, adoption and deployment of new technologies in ATM. The project has developed a new set of methodologies and tools enabling a comprehensive assessment of policies and regulations aimed at amplifying the uptake of new technologies within ATM.

The project

ITACA is a research project funded under SESAR 2020 Exploratory Research seeking to accelerate the development, adoption and deployment of new technologies in ATM. To this end, ITACA has developed a new set of methodologies and tools enabling a rigorous and comprehensive assessment of policies and regulations aimed at amplifying the uptake of new technologies within ATM. ITACA’s vision is that of a European ATM system that incorporates the most advanced technologies in a dynamic and agile way to drive continuous innovation, deliver enhanced performance and adapt to changing market needs.

Goals

The project aims to shed light on the drivers and barriers for the adoption of new technologies in ATM, with the ultimate goal of supporting the identification, formulation and implementation of policies and regulations that accelerate ATM modernisation. 

The specific objectives of the project are the following:

1. Identify the main drivers and barriers for technological change in ATM and devise a set of policy measures and regulatory changes with the potential to lower such barriers and incentivise faster technology upgrade.
2. Develop an agent-based model of the R&I lifecycle allowing the representation of the complex decisions and interactions between ATM stakeholders and their impact on the development and implementation of new technologies.
3. Validate the behavioural assumptions of the agent-based model through a set of participatory simulation experiments involving the direct participation of ATM stakeholders.
4. Demonstrate and evaluate the potential of the newly developed methods and tools through a set of policy assessment exercises that will analyse the impact of a variety of policies and regulatory changes aimed at accelerating technology change in ATM, with particular focus on the distributional effects of the proposed policies across ATM stakeholders and society at large.
5. Consolidate the methods, tools and lessons learnt delivered by the project into a coherent policy assessment framework and a set of policy recommendations, and provide guidelines for the future maintenance, evolution and use of the proposed framework.