The SESAR3 Digital European Sky EUREKA research project has launched at Fiumicino Airport in Rome. EUREKA aims to accommodate Vertiport operations in the European airspace to enable Urban Air Mobility (UAM). A consortium of 35 members from all over Europe, under the leadership of Eurocontrol, collaborates in the EUREKA project until mid-2026. The project has a total investment of about EUR12 million, including EUR6.9 million funding from the SESAR3 Joint Undertaking (S3JU).
At its core, EUREKA is about developing four solutions and integrating them with each other:
💡 Vertiport arrival & departure management
This solution will enable the management of safe & operationally efficient arrival and departure from the vertiport in different use cases. It will cover different ATM and U-space environments and time horizons. It will also enable the implementation of UAM operations by proposing routes and trajectories around and between vertiports based on best practices and guidelines to achieve UAM accommodation while focusing on the technical specifications and requirements of UAMs vehicles as well as planning elements and methods of application for a common description that will cover operational concepts and requirements.
💡 Vertiport collaborative traffic management
This solution will develop a Vertiport Management service and a U-space management service that enables the Vertiport Collaborative Traffic Management (VCTM) concept.
💡 Disruption and emergency management
This solution will enable vertiports & USSPs to manage unexpected situations in the field of security and safety, at nearby vertiports. This is crucial because we operate in a “veriport-on-the-airport” situation. We want to validate a new “U3 emergency service for vertiports”, as a future new service for U-space.
💡 Vertiport network flow, capacity and operational management
This solution will enable efficient and safe vertiport operations with a holistic view at the local vertiport network level. Ground and air capacity in a vertiports system are strongly related, the vertiport network can be considered as a new concept of wide-spread mobility infrastructure. The solution will allow managing information regarding the capacity of the different parts of the system (vertiports); external factors that can influence it ( vertiport surroundings); tools to communicate with the other stakeholders of the process (eVTOL operators, ATM and UTM service providers).
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