A holistic approach to evaluate the air transportation system

Abstract

The German Aerospace Center's (DLR) newly founded institute of air transportation and technology evaluation has been given the mission to integrate disciplinary DLR activities on an ATS level. To accomplish this, a systems engineering approach is presented, adapted to the conditions of DLR and the ATS as the system of interest. In order to capture required disciplinary knowledge on a technology in question, the analysis phase allows for methods like scenarioprocess and Delphi surveys. Based on this outcome, requirements and a functional description are derived. Methods of different fidelity are applied to find a design synthesis, which is to be evaluated against the requirements or a benchmark. Based on this, a decision is taken. Special effort is required to integrate high fidelity methods and tools in the overall evaluation process, managing the trade-off between abstraction and computational speed on the one side and on the other significance of results.