Network Business Intelligence

This project strengthens the business intelligence capabilities of the EUROCONTROL Network Manager (NM) in support of the planning and performance review phases. It provides the information necessary to monitor and report on the performance targets set-up by the performance plans and in accordance with the Performance Scheme Implementing Rule.

The improvements cover four key aspects. 

Network Monitoring and Reporting

We support NM and stakeholder performance monitoring in all areas including connectivity, inter-modality and access to airports, passenger information and satisfaction, vertical flight efficiency, safety risks, security risks, human factors (e.g. change management, crises management, working conditions), environment sustainability (e.g. fuel consumption, biofuels, gas emissions, noise reduction).

Network Performance Analysis and Investigation

We support:

• the NM and stakeholder operational performance analysis for finding the root causes of lack of performance (data availability, prototyping facilities, analysis, monitoring, and reporting tools).
• the network state modelling and prediction algorithms for state transitions based on the network performance indicators and allowing for early detection of critical states and triggering remedial actions;
• the prediction of the performance capabilities of the NM operational system to support the evolution of the ops performance in the next reference periods;

In addition, we use predictive analytics modelling to complement the current traffic forecasts, thus allowing automated short-horizon forecasts and predictions of a wide range of indicators (“forecasting everything”). 

We also provide user-centric functionalities for on-demand and near real-time recommendation (prescriptive analytics) for allowing data-driven decision making, assisting operations, and automating behaviour through use of prescriptive analytics.

Network Performance Enablers

We utilise a standard business intelligence tool stack, which contains new tools and extends existing tools for, among others, data visualisation, dashboards, reporting and predictive or prescriptive analytics. The visualisation tools allow for presenting, interpreting or exploring data with drill-down (navigate from aggregated to less aggregated and granular data) and drill-through (navigate through interlinked data) functionalities.

We also provide a self-service portal and a sandbox environment allowing from simple-to-use drag-and-drop functionalities to complex analytics for which advanced statistic skills are needed for modelling and analysis. In addition, we support techniques exploiting big amounts of data for performance analysis/auditing/forecasting/operations planning and ensure an efficient interface with Cloud based Big Data Technology.

The project delivers cost savings by consolidating our reporting tools, while improving our forecasts and accelerating our plan-do-review cycle, in particular due to the use of big data technologies allow.

The data quality will also be improved by using more data and more data sources, which will improve the support of the performance scheme implementing rule.

Additionally, by going beyond the pure performance monitoring and reporting and by using predictive and prescriptive analysis based on big data, the project supports near real-time operations, allowing data-driven decision-making, which is expected to improve significantly the operational efficiency.