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Currently, the European air transport system is experiencing an annual growth of 7%. With an increasing number of flights, airports are reaching their capacity limits and are becoming a bottleneck in the system. Mantea is a European Commission funded project dealing with this issue. This paper focuses on planning decision support tools for airport traffic controllers.

The objective of our planning tools is to achieve a better use of the available airport infrastructure (taxiways and runways). To generate a safe plan, many rules must be taken into account that restrict the usage of airport tarmac: international regulations, airport operational procedures, aircraft performance, weather conditions and sometimes even controller “usual practices”. To generate a realistic plan, extensive monitoring of the traffic situation as well as suitable timing must be achieved. In the life cycle of a flight, 11 out of 15 possible causes of delay occur in an interval of 10-20 minutes, between aircraft start-up request and push-back. This means that precise planning before the end of this period is highly improbable. On the other hand, planning after this period implies the need for fast responses from the system.

In the Mantea project, an architecture is proposed in which a co-operative approach is taken towards planning aircraft movements at the airport. Controllers will be supported by planning tools that help assigning routes and departure times to controlled vehicles, in planning runway allocation (departure sequence) and occupancies, and in monitoring plan progress during flight phases. The planning horizon relates to medium term operations, i.e. 2-20 minutes ahead. The Mantea planning tools implement the following functions: runway departure planning, routing, and plan conformance monitoring. The tools will reduce the controller's workload, increase the level of safety for airport surface movements, and reduce the number of delays and operating costs for the airliners.

In this paper, we will focus on the constraint satisfaction programming techniques used in Mantea for (1) runway departure planning, (2) itinerary search and taxi planning functions. The airport tarmac and runway vicinity air routes have been modelled as a graph. Real time constraints have brought us to develop an algorithm linear in complexity for the itinerary search problem. Operational pressure has led us to develop fast search strategies for scheduling (i.e. use of heuristics, hill climbing…).

This paper presents the safety case for the consideration of cross-cultural factors in aviation by focusing on cultural interfaces, those situations where members of one culture encounter people or artifacts from other cultures. Global aviation is strongly influenced by the USA and Western Europe as the largest manufacturers and largest customers; hence almost all cultural interfaces are weighted in favor of the dominant users. The challenge for safety is not to ignore or eliminate these interfaces but to manage the potential threats they pose. To move forward, there is a role for those inside and outside the dominant model.

Despite air travel having become a widely used means of transportation, the technological sophistication and human skill required for flying an aircraft remains a source of fascination and admiration. Aviation has been coined an ultra-safe system, coping with the duality of safety and efficiency by emphasizing expertise and learning, but also standardization and automation. Highly selected and continuously trained pilots have to work with increasingly complex and autonomous technology, which creates tensions between routinization and responsible action. Research on leadership and coordination in aircrews is reviewed in light of these tensions, pointing to the benefits of a functional approach to leadership which promotes optimal use of all resources in the team toward adaptive coordination. Furthermore, the leadership requirements arising from the fact that aircrews are ad hoc teams, usually only formed for a few flights, are discussed in terms of fast team-building coupled with the reliance on shared knowledge stemming from high levels of standardization. Due to the complex demands for leadership in aircrews, special training programs were developed early on, which have become a standard that many other high-risk industries are still striving for. The generalizability and need for further development of concepts embedded in successfully leading aircrews is scrutinized, focusing especially on leadership in ad hoc teams, the interplay of standardization and leadership, and the balance between shared and formal leadership.

Understanding how health status and physiological factors affect performance is a daunting task. This chapter will discuss physiological, behavioral, and psychological factors that influence or determine the capacity to fight, and will consider metrics that can be used to measure their status. The premise of this discussion is that there is a set of physiological and psychological factors that intimately affect performance and that the relative contribution of these variables is individually unique. These factors can be identified and assessed, and are amenable to modification. A fuller understanding of these variables can lead the effort to maintain and improve performance in the adverse and challenging environments of military operations.

Old age is a complex and dynamic phenomenon. The relationship between old age and transport is also very complex due to the heterogeneity within this age group. Yet what is certain is that with age, a person’s functional abilities change. This chapter provides a summary of how older people can be vulnerable within the road environment. Using an established framework for understanding old-age vulnerabilities, this chapter explains the common exposure factors and threats that several older people face in the transport environment. These primarily deal with individual physical and cognitive characteristics, medical conditions as well as the appropriateness (or not) of infrastructure. Subsequently, common difficulties for older drivers, pedestrians and public transport users are discussed. The main vulnerabilities that result from such difficulties are related to an over-representation of older people in accidents and to a lower quality of life due to mobility inefficiencies. Yet, using the same framework, the compensation techniques that older people often adopt to minimise such limitations are also highlighted. Reference is also made to the issues related to the lack of awareness in old age and the corresponding inability to compensate. The review concludes by suggesting a way forward for further studies on transport vulnerability in later life.

This chapter describes public space exploration services’ business goals, purpose, and strategy. It reinforces space exploration organizations’ fundamental bureaucratic administrative culture (Tier 1). The authors describe the influence that political appointees as leaders may play in shaping public sector cultures. Next, the public service culture (Tier 2) is deconstructed, and each of the five layers is described in detail. Additionally, the authors explain why focusing on the beliefs layer is the dominant layer and the essential starting point for analysis in space exploration cultures. Next, the chapter outlines the landscape of external influencing cultures (Tier 3) in the space exploration landscape. Finally, the potential value and challenges of developing internal KLC cultures are explored.