Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 & H2020 Projects

PERF-AI project (Nov 2018 - Nov 2020, involving Benjamin Guedj, Vincent Vandewalle - hired Florent Dewez, Arthur Taelpert). Two partners: Inria LNE and the company Safety Line (Paris, France).

Commercial aviation is already responsible for 3% of the total CO2 emissions, and with a constant growth rate of 5% per year, traffic will double within the next decade. With the support of new technologies such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, in-flight connectivity, major improvements can be introduced to optimize flight trajectories. PERF-AI focuses on the challenge of minimizing fuel consumption throughout the flight. The aim of PERF-AI is to provide a flight trajectory optimization prototype that implements new machine learning performance models.

The first step of the project that was carried out in the first year was to define, implement and test narrow system identification techniques. Several Machine Learning methods have been tried and have provided very encouraging initial results.

PERF-AI main objective is to provide a computation engine that can be used in two ways:

• support update of FMS that integrate individual aircraft performance models, that allow to perform accurate trajectory prediction;

• perform trajectory optimization on the ground using most accurate aircraft performance models.

Collaborations with Major European Organizations

• Sophie Dabo-Niang is chair of EMS-CDC (European Mathematical society-Committe of Developing Countries).

• Sophie Dabo-Niang is a member of the executive committee of CIMPA (International Centre of Pure and Applied Mathematics)