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Resilience is defined by the United Nations as “the ability to resist, absorb and accommodate to the effects of a hazard, in a timely and efficient manner”. Thus, resilient communities are those in which their citizens, environment, businesses, and infrastructures have the capacity to withstand, adapt, and recover in a timely manner from any kind of hazards they face, either planned or unplanned. In recent years efforts have been spent to tackle resilience and there is, still, a long path forward in defining an EU valid and sound approach to the problem.

RESILOC aims at studying and implementing a holistic framework of studies, methods and software instruments that combines the physical with the less tangible aspects associated with human behaviour.

The study-oriented section of the framework will move from a thorough collection and analysis of literature and stories from the many approaches to resilience adopted all over the World. The results of the studies will lead to the definition of a set of new methods and strategies where the assessment of the resilience indicators of a community will be performed together with simulations on the “what-if” certain measures are taken. These studies and methods will serve for designing and implementing two software instruments:

1.     the RESILOC inventory, a comprehensive, live, structure for collecting, classifying and using information on cities and local communities, implemented as a Software as a Service (SaaS).

2.     The RESILOC Cloud-based platform for assessing and calculating the resilience indicators of a city or a community, for developing localised strategies and verifying their impacts on the resilience of the community. The Cloud platform, a combination of SaaS and PaaS, includes the inventory as its repository.

The project will make use of built solutions in four field trials and includes a high-profile communication plan, heavily based on Social Media platforms.

Contact: Dr. Harald Sieke, harald.sieke@iml.fraunhofer.de

ARESIBO aims at improving the efficiency of the border surveillance systems by providing the operational teams and the tactical command and control level with an accurate and comprehensive information. The pillars of research in ARESIBO are three-fold:

1.     Set-up a complete configuration at tactical and execution level to optimise the collaboration between human and sensors (fixed and mobile),

2.     Improve situation awareness by enhancing the understanding of the situation through adapted processing of sensor data, correlation between heterogeneous data and information and creation of knowledge through deep learning techniques and

3.     Create a situation awareness capability at C2 level that will combine reports on previous missions, real time situation understanding and threat analysis for future actions. This capability will be used to optimise the operations (teams deployment and sensor positioning) as well as an online briefing tool for the teams that will be able to access to the results of the previous missions while in the field.

ARESIBO integrates research activities in the domain of

1.     surveillance platforms (air, ground, surface, underwater) to optimise the collaborative capabilities of the platforms and their positioning (between themselves and with the teams),

2.     Sensor processing to interpret, fuse and correlate all the data to produce information and knowledge and

3.     Augmented reality techniques to elaborate and provide to the operators a situation awareness picture which is fit for their missions (minimum information for maximal understanding) both as team level and tactical C2 level.

The ARESIBO system will be developed incrementally during the 3 years with two major versions that will lead to sub-versions for land and maritime borders. The system will be tested and assessed in 1. a controlled environment enabling testing at any time without pre-requisite authorisations and 2. in real conditions in Finland, Greece, Romania and Portugal for the 2 versions.

Contact: Dr. Harald Sieke, harald.sieke@iml.fraunhofer.de

The 13th IATA World Cargo Symposium will take place in Singapore from 12 to 14 March 2019. The aviation logistics department will be represented by our Head of Department Harald Sieke and Lars Mehrtens. Mr. Sieke will present the latest state of our Augmented Reality based ULD Build-Up as well as an outlook on "Automation Opportunities & Operational Efficiency".

Download: Agenda Horizon I Cargo Operations

Harald Sieke and Oliver Ditz, together with selected participants and @Airbus, defined the future of air freight from 13.11.2018 to 15.11.2018. #FutureCargoHackathon

The Aviation Group of the Fraunhofer Transportation Alliance is pleased to invite you to a conference on "Digital Reality for Production and MRO Innovation".

The conference will address the chances and risks of the unfolding digitalisation in the field of aircraft production and MRO. The conference will provide an opportunity for participants to discuss future concepts and possible directions of innovation. Industry experts from the Fraunhofer Institute, AIRBUS, MTU and IATA will present their assessments of how the aviation industry may change as it innovates for comprehensive digitalisation. Artificial Intelligent systems will continuously develop and adapt their capabilities for reducing the workloads in production as well as MRO. People in the industry will be able to concentrate on system control functions and strategic decisions. Man-Machine collaboration will become part of new 'digital realities'.

Shipments are usually transported between air freight forwarding hubs located at airports or close to airports and various handling agents by trucks. Due to the volatile aircargo volume and the high degree of labor division between stakeholders, mixed with contradictory optimization efforts for services offered and cost minimization, inefficiencies occur. These comprises for example low utilization of transport resources or long waiting times for truck handling.

Due to the often missing, anticipating data transmission and interruptions in the information flow, cargo volume resp. handling peaks occur quite frequently. These unnecessarily bind handling capacities of handling agents and lead at ramps to long, incalculable waiting times. Consequently, freight forwarders order truck transports, with low load factors. This in turn burdens the transport system, by tying additional handling resources.

The aim of "Smart Air Cargo Trailer" is therefore, in the sense of the "Internet of Things" (IoT), a better use of resources and an increase in efficiency through process control using object-immanent data and information of the logistics objects. These data will be stored within the process chain both directly at the individual shipments and at standard or swap trailer, used for transport. In addition, a prototypical demonstrator of entirely digital and autonomous transports within an airport operating area, side by side with mixed traffic, is planned to be achieved.

These autonomous transports are requested independently and on demand within the airport premises. The autonomous vehicles pick up the trailer and bring it to the appropriate destination resp. ramp at a forwarder or handling agent terminal. This leads to the decoupling of the ramp and handling processes of the handling agents from the transport processes, thus both can be optimized independently by each party.

This project (HA Project No .: 575/17-57) is funded and part of “Hessen Modell Projekte” of the LOEWE - funding line 3: SME collaborative projects.

Industry 4.0 should not stop at airfreight, even though many of the previous industrial revolution topics such as integrated IT, automation or paperless processing have still been unfinished for many years. Therefore, on 7th December 2017, the Air Cargo Team of the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML invited to a full-day roundtable "Air Cargo 4.0" at the House of Logistics & Mobility (HOLM) at Frankfurt Airport.

As part of this exclusive event, current practical and research topics on technologies and principles of "Industry 4.0" related to airfreight were presented and discussed with around 20 participants from around 15 companies such as airports, service providers and system suppliers of airfreight. After presenting a vision of the future of airfreight at the airport (Picture of the Future), Fraunhofer IML presented and demonstrated current developments in logistics, which may also be of interest to airfreight. During workshops with the participants, the future concepts and possible directions of development were discussed, assessed and prioritized together.

The event was rated very positively by all participants. In particular, the workshops with the industry experts provided the Fraunhofer Air Cargo Team with important information and insights for future research and development activities.

From 20^th to 21^st of July 2017 representative of Fraunhofer Aviation Logistics was invited by the Fraunhofer SPACE alliance. The Fraunhofer SPACE alliance combines the technological expertise of 15 institutes to offer a central contact for system solutions to the aerospace industry and to public funding agencies such as the ESA or the European Commission.

The exchange with institute representatives of the Fraunhofer SPACE alliance aimed to present the AVIATION Group of Fraunhofer TRANSPORT alliance, as well as to discuss space technology, political and environmental factors, market changes and potential opportunities using complementary institute competencies in AVIATION and SPACE.

Despite the new market entries, the United States continues to be in the driving seat of expanding civil space activities. The serial production of satellites is becoming increasingly important and system solutions for improved tracking & tracing of space scrap contribute significantly to improve the economic visibility of satellite solutions.

Taking the complementary institute competences in the aerospace industry into consideration, the participants emphasized on the good success prospects particularly for system solutions for SPACE applications.

Air traffic plays a special role in terms of safety and security. This is due to the history air traffic why it is particularly sensitive and correspondingly complex and expensive. On the other hand, a safe air traffic is an important economical factor. The safety risk for air traffic, both in air and on the ground, is strongly influenced by natural events such as critical icing of the aircraft on the ground. According to the clean aircraft principle, an aircraft is only allowed to launch if it is free from ice and snow. Therefore, aircrafts must be individually de-iced prior to take-off and if necessary protected against re-icing. A quick and reliable detection of critical aircraft icing on the ground is needed during day and night times to prevent important aircraft systems during take-off and to avoid critical flight conditions with an impact on passenger and infrastructure safety.

In this light, researchers from Fraunhofer IML invited on 20th June 2017 experts from airlines, airports, groundhandlers, system providers and facilitators to discuss their new research initiative. In addition, during break-out-sessions the 12 experts gathered their key strength, weaknesses opportunities and threads of a future drone supported de-icing process of aircrafts at airports with e.g. respect to interoperability with the existing complex infrastructure, de-icing measurement technology, operating times, necessary approval processes, the supporting IT infrastructure as well as a intelligent data processing by means of wearables for the various process participants.

With the concept of an "Aviation Safety Drone 4.0", the researchers and industry members want to apply the principles and technologies of industry 4.0 to airside processes and thereby want to generate an added value for flight safety, said Dr. Harald Sieke

The digital transformation of commercial traffic is quickly progressing and has a disruptive effect on established logistic processes. In this light representative of Fraunhofer Aviation Logistics were invited to present and discuss at a conference of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Savety (BMUB). This conference took place on 27.06.17 in Berlin and had the title “Autonomous, networked and integrated - does digitization provide us with an environmentally friendly traffic?".

The exchange with representatives from industry, research, facilitators and politics served to illuminate the opportunities and risks of digitization for the environment and urban development. In several workshops the topics of private transport, economic transport and logistics were interactive discussed with all conference participants. Thereby, questions were discussed such as: Everything is connected within a network - what kind of traffic effects are expected from new digital services? How does digitalization change supply chains ? What is the potential of digitalization for positive environmental effects and what are risks?

From 23rd to 24th May 2017 representative of Fraunhofer Aviation Logistics were invited by the G-12 Aircraft Ground Deicing Steering Group. The international exchange with representatives from airports, aircraft manufacturers, equipment suppliers etc. aimed Fraunhofer IML to extend their airport drone network, for a technical discourse and the acquisition of additional associated project partners for the research project initiative.

The lively discussion with the community has provided us with many valuable results, that will be considered while executing the next steps. Furthermore, Dr. Harald Sieke is available for appointments with interested representatives from industry and politics, who are interested in airport drones.

Fuel prices fluctuate due to complex economic and political contexts. This affects particularly enterprises along the aviation logistics supply chain, e.g. shippers, carriers and airlines. In this environment it is difficult and complex to conclude long-term airfreight transportation contracts. In addition, there is an increased financial risk especially in case of long-term "all-in-tariffs".

The total airfreight transport costs consist of a base rate, a fuel surcharge and a security surcharge.

Over time, the height of the fuel surcharge varies among different trade lines (TC 1-3 and finer) and different airlines. This complexity of possible variables leads to a complex calculation model and thus to a cost block which is difficult to reproduce for airfreight transportation providers and their customers.

As a result, Fraunhofer IML was asked to provide a neutral Fuel Surcharge Index that creates airfreight transport cost transparency and is usable as a variable factor for long-term airfreight transport contract.

The Fuel Surcharge Index of the Fraunhofer IML has already been included as an integral part of contracts between well-known shippers and forwarders. In addition, Fraunhofer IML is looking forward to other interested enterprises as Dr. Harald Sieke from Fraunhofer IML says.

On April 26, Fraunhofer IML invited to the HOLM and presented the research project "Smart Baggage Services 4.0". Together with the project partners SITA, IATA and Stuttgart Airport as well as 21 experts from airlines, airports, ground handling service providers, transportation providers, system providers and authorities, the research project was discussed and additional aspects were worked out together in break-out sessions.

With the concept of SBS 4.0 the project partners want to apply the vision of Industrie 4.0 to the baggage transport. A complete digital twin of the baggage has to depict the collected raw data over the entire transport chain and has to allow intervening in the processes at any time. The overall goal is the development of innovative business models based on autonomous end-to-end baggage processes. A demonstrator for travelers and service providers based on cloud and app technology, which is linked to the existing infrastructure, is to be tested within the scope of the research project.

The Roundtable has provided valuable contributions, which will be taken into account in the course of further action. The many positive feedbacks have encouraged the partners to organize further events of this kind. The existing consortium is still open for further project partners. In addition, associate partners should be involved in monitoring the research project.

Contact: Dr. Harald Sieke, harald.sieke@iml.fraunhofer.de

A significant reduction in emissions is one of the key challenges in maintaining life quality and value creation in Europe. In this context, air traffic emissions are of particular importance. On the one hand, due to history, the issue of air transport emissions reduction is particularly sensitive and correspondingly complex and expensive. On the other hand, a low-emission air traffic is an important economic factor.

Within Clean Sky, Fraunhofer IML analyzes the latest technology concepts with logistics relevance along the entire aircraft supply chain (production, MRO, recycling) and assesses them according to ecological, economic and social aspects. This assessment from Fraunhofer IML provides an essential basis for systematically optimizing the latest technology and logistics approaches.

Clean Sky is the largest European research program developing innovative, cutting-edge technology aimed at reducing CO2, gas emissions and noise levels produced by aircraft.

On 8th February, representatives from eight Fraunhofer institutes met for the kick-off meeting of Fraunhofer-AVIATION Group at the House of Logistics and Mobility in Frankfurt. The meeting was aimed to present AVIATION relevant activities of participating institutes and to plan the next steps for external communication at conferences, trade fairs and digital media. Above that, activities for the joint initiation of research and industrial projects were decided.

The discussion also showed that the need for cross-institute solutions is very high. Because of the interdisciplinary experience of eight Fraunhofer institutes combined with specialized knowledge in the area of ​​AVIATION, customers from industry and politics can now select a well networked team of experts in the field of industrial oriented research. The Fraunhofer AVIATION Group is a reliable and target oriented partner for industrial and public partners designing and implementing innovative and economically viable system solutions in the field of AVIATION by using well-established methodologies.

The Fraunhofer AVIATION Group is an initiative of the Fraunhofer-Alliance for Transport. Head of Department for Aviation Logistics at Fraunhofer IML, Dr. Harald Sieke is available for appointments with interested representatives from industry and politics.

From 12^th to 15^th December 2016 representative of Fraunhofer Aviation Logistics were invited by the German Science Centre Cairo. Meetings with Egyptian Holding Comany for Airports and Air Navigation (EHCAAN), Suez Canal Economic Zone as well as with the transport committee of Academy of Scientific Research and Technology were held for networking purposes, professional exchange and joint project initiation.

Based on the core competencies of Fraunhofer IML the potential of Egypt (EGY) can be considered as high. With an optimized connection from the port of Ain Sokhna to the International Airport of Cairo the regional needs of a logistical hub that interlinks North Africa with Europe and the Central African region, could also be better addressed and has the potential to create incentives for manufacturing high tech products in EGY to be just-in-time delivered to Europe. As the biggest accelerator for expanding the cargo volume at Cairo International Airport Fraunhofer IML sees the reconciliation processes within the EHCAAN as well as with third partners such as Egyptair.

Finally, Fraunhofer IML emphasized the possibility of German companies with subsidies in EGY and in close cooperation with German Arab Chamber of Industry and Commerce (AHK) to jointly approach responsible authorities and to proactively propose and accelerate innovative logistic concepts and solutions that fit to the demands of EGY. Fraunhofer IML is looking forward for preparatory meetings with corresponding contacts of the AHK.

The Fraunhofer IML has received the order to plan the new cargo terminal (CT02) at Hamad International Airport in Doha / Qatar. The project is being implemented alongside the current Midfield Cargo Terminal (CT01) and covers the planning and design of logistics areas, office space, land and air-side building linkage as well as roads and other common infrastructures.

The planning services were commissioned by the Italian engineering office F & M Ingegneria Spa. These services include the pre-design phase with support for cargo requirements management and cargo concept development. This includes the inventory of CT01, the derivation of the target capacities, the determination of the area requirements, the arrangement of the logistic areas and the interface definition between CT01 and CT02.

After its completion, the new cargo terminal CT02 will be one of the largest freight terminals in the world.

Year 2035 in Hesse – digitalization has captured and changed almost every aspect of our everyday life and here especially the logistics and mobility economy: Mobility has become a comprehensive service offer. The flow of goods nowadays is almost completely transparent. For each end product, customers can not only recognize where the goods are, but also determine where and when the goods should be delivered.  Modern information management also allows to obtain details about the "ecological footprint" and about where and under which conditions the goods have been manufactured.

Fraunhofer IML and the House of Logistics and Mobility (HOLM) have dealt with these and other topics in the last months. As a result the future picture "Logistics and Mobility in Hesse 2035" was developed by experts from business, science and politics as well as citizens of the Federal State through surveys, workshops and interviews. They sketched the variety of topics in seven areas of logistics and mobility.

The study points to promising, worldwide approaches and gives recommendations for business, science and politics.

Click here to download the study (in german language only)

Infrastructure planning for baggage handling at airports is affected by increasing changes of requirements. Integrated transport services along with the digitization of passengers and baggage form the basis for new trends. The Department of Aviation Logistics and the Center for Maritime Logistics of Fraunhofer IML were commissioned by Flughafen Hamburg GmbH to record and evaluate current trends as well as their impact on the Hamburg location.

In the future, passengers will be able to hand over their baggage at their doorstep. Then the baggage is transported to the airport, flown and transferred to the destination independently of the passenger. "Intelligent" baggage with a digital baggage tag with RFID, GPS and Internet connection will facilitate baggage control and give the passenger information on the current position of their suitcases at all times. Improved baggage processes that support these trends can become an important competitive advantage for airports.