Project description
The ERA project responds to one of the most important challenges facing the air transport industry: ensuring the financial viability of the business in order to meet society’s transport needs, while minimising the environmental impact of its operations, so as not to compromise the future of the next generations.
Its objective has been the design of a digital tool that facilitates the decision-making of the company through an accurate assessment of economic profitability and business sustainability. In this way, Airbus will be able to design its products with a more detailed understanding of the financial and environmental impacts of aircraft according to our customers' business strategy.
This is a research project to design an artificial intelligence platform (using the latest techniques such as machine learning, neural networks, etc.) to allow precise and detailed calculation of the revenues of airlines on routes operating in different commercial scenarios (aircraft fleet, scheduling, etc.), for subsequent evaluation of costs (regular and environmental) associated with the operation and its environmental impact in such a way that the profitability of the routes and their sustainability can be assessed. The objective is to obtain a balance between financial profitability and environmental sustainability of each commercial scenario, being able to compare different cases.
The developed tool allows to analyse the flow of passengers at route level, for this purpose specific prediction algorithms have been designed for convex combinations (sharing traffic between the different routes, knowing that the sum of all routes must always represent 100% of the traffic between origin and destination). The design of this new algorithm assumes a new paradigm within artificial intelligence algorithms and can start a research path in many other fields, beyond air transport.