Helicopter Mission Analysis Using a Multidisciplinary Simulation Framework

“Clean Sky” joint technology initiative

HE European Airspace is becoming more and more congested as traffic is forecast to grow steadily over the next 20 years and beyond. To meet the challenge of sustainable growth of Air Transport Management in Europe, an Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe (ACARE) was launched in June 2001. ACARE's main focus is to establish and carry forward a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA 1/2) that will influence all European stakeholders in the planning of research programs, particularly national and EU programs, in line with the Vision 2020 and the goals it identifies. Among these programs, SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) and its various phases (from Definition to Development and ultimately Deployment) has the ambition to face the lack of commitment from a part of the Stakeholders or from deciders in previous initiatives. The Definition Phase, jointly funded by EUROCONTROL and the European Commission, will deliver a European ATM Master Plan based on future aviation requirements, and will identify the actions needed to achieve the objectives of SESAR. At the European level, other programs are strongly linked with SESAR, including the Joint Technology Initiatives (JTI) a new instrument provided by the European Seventh Framework Programme, to support research of long duration. One of those initiatives, called CLEAN SKY, will create various technology demonstrators, including flight test vehicles that will be essential for successful market introduction. Research into the future of the air transportation system critically depends upon the ability to evaluate the effects of the revolutionary candidate concepts across the entire air transportation system. The testing of these concepts through modeling and simulation can provide useful information on improvements on system capacity/safety and related environmental impact. In this evolutionary European context, the French Aerospace Laboratory (ONERA) is carrying out an ambitious program (IESTA) to design a modeling and simulation infrastructure able of evaluating innovative air transport concepts. This platform has to be considered as a mean to help harmonization of panEuropean assessment tools for innovative research on future Air Transport Systems (ATS). This paper firstly introduces organizational issues of the IESTA Program focusing on expected benefits of the underlying approach from the customer's point of view. We then discuss system architectural issues of the platform as well as technological features. Finally, we give a detailed presentation of a rapid prototype of the first version

Teams in action, such as emergency responders and medical personnel, are challenged with environments that are characterized by time pressure, rapidly unfolding events, high information processing demand, and severe consequences of wrong decisions. Such environments in general have adverse effects on team performance. To mitigate this problem and increase the performance and resilience of teams, we developed the Collective Allostatic Load Measures system. Collective Allostatic Load Measures system collects, aggregates, and analyzes multimodal data, and provides recommendation and intervention mechanisms under acute and chronic stressors. The key innovation in Collective Allostatic Load Measures is the integration of multimodal sensing capabilities with accurate algorithms that can process sequential multimodal data from heterogeneous sensors. We built a prototype of Collective Allostatic Load Measures that incorporates the core functionalities that can assess allostatic load at the team level, namely collective allostatic load. Collective Allostatic Load Measures includes a set of commercial off-the-shelf sensors that record an individual’s physiological responses, a speech processing module that can extract the communication patterns of a team, a machine-learning based computational analysis module, a mobile phone app, and a web-based dashboard for visualization. Collective Allostatic Load Measures provides near real-time quantitative measurement of collective allostatic load that is leveraged to improve team performance and resilience by recommending interventions.

ABSTRACTThis paper deals with the development of a simulation platform for the dynamic analysis of systems characterised by different physical domains. The research has been carried out in the context of the EC-funded Clean Sky Joint Technology Initiative (Green Regional Aircraft/All-Electric Aircraft domain). In particular, the objective of the research is focused on the on-board systems of new All-Electric Aircraft, where a crucial design point is related to the electrical energy management. In the “all-electric” concept, where pneumatic and hydraulic power systems are eliminated to improve aviation costs and environmental impact, the dynamics of electrical power absorptions is to be characterised and managed to avoid excessive peaks with respect to generators capabilities. The paper describes the architecture of a Matlab/Simulink simulation platform developed in order to design and validate of the electrical energy management logics, which lead up to 32% reduction of the maximum power request for the case study considered. Thanks to an approach based on a mixing of co-simulation and S-function compiling, the platform integrates models coming from different environments (AMESim, Dymola/Modelica), and developed by various partners/specialists.

The present contribution concerns the activities carried out in the Clean Sky GRC5 MANOEUVRES project. The overall goal of the project is to provide an innovative system to monitor rotorcraft noise in flight, in view of performing optimized low-noise terminal procedures. To achieve this goal it is necessary to estimate in real time the main rotor tip-path plane (TPP) orientation with respect to the vehicle airspeed vector, which in turn depends on the TPP orientation with respect to the helicopter airframe. An in-flight contactless measuring system, capable of measuring the three angles of a helicopter blade with respect to the hub, is proposed and validated. Its development is detailed, starting from the selection of candidate technologies up to the final demonstration of a prototypal device on board an AgustaWestland AW139 prototype helicopter.