Aviation is a vital industrial sector of Europe’s society and economy. For several historical reasons the economic activities in this field are unevenly distributed across Europe. Statistics show that also the R&D effort, which always comes along with the aviation, mirrors this allocation. On one hand, there are countries and regions featuring low involvement in aviation research and also low participation in the EU Framework Programmes; on the other – some regions are heavily involved in aviation R&D and are origin of wealth and prosperity. RADIAN is a multi-step project which intends to overcome this misbalance by identification of barriers for international collaboration in aviation research at EU level and by subsequent development and verification of solutions and measures on level of the European regions. The initial step is to assess the impact of regional, national and international environment on aviation actors. An impact is considered to become a “barrier” in case it has a detrimental nature or significantly differs from the pan-European average. By systematically comparing single impact scenarios for various actors located in different European regions, barriers for cooperation will be identified. Having this verified knowledge, 12 target regions are identified to derive, verify and execute tailored activity plans aiming at the enhancement of the actor’s ability to cooperate by reducing the disadvantageous impact or by the advancement of actor’s own assets, knowledge and abilities. Another field of work of RADIAN is a self-sustaining collaboration platform which acts as a host for transnational exchange. The platform aims at becoming a live portal, for providing personalised information related to the users’ interests such as open calls, available funding schemes, recent advancements etc.

BEST will determine how semantic technologies can be used effectively to maximise the benefits of adopting SWIM, one of the major results of SESAR. SWIM offers an “information sharing” approach to ATM information management and its adoption offers advantages for better situational awareness and information management. But the full benefits of SWIM can only be achieved if advanced support can be provided for developing smart SWIM-based applications that manage information effectively, and semantic technologies offer a promising way to do that. BEST identifies a set of focused research questions about how to exploit semantic technologies in a practical way in an ATM setting, and will produce concrete results that help address these. The project will experiment with use of semantic technologies with several use cases, and build on that experience to produce guidelines (aimed at practitioners) about how to use ontologies in flexible ways to describe meta-data, and how these can be used in innovative yet scalable ways. BEST envisages use of multiple modular ontologies to maximise flexibility and applicability to specific application scenarios, but within a framework where compliance with the wider requirements of SWIM and the SESAR AIRM can be assured. This involves both technical compliance testing and governance aspects. While BEST is primarily a research-oriented project, it is also designed to ensure relevance to and suitability for ATM operations, through project activities and the involvement of a Reference Group of key stakeholders. The consortium includes a mixture of research and industrial partners (including one SME), all with extensive ATM experience. Several project partners have had leading roles in AIRM and SWIM work in SESAR, but some partners are new to SESAR and offer “new blood”. The consortium also provides leading expertise on semantic technologies. The project duration will be 24 months, with a requested funding of just under 600 K€.