What is SPADE?

Within the EU, air traffic demand is expected to increase by an average rate of 3.6% per year for the period 2002-2020. Under present conditions, the growing demand and the resulting mismatch between demand and supply of airport services will result in an increase of congestion problems at airports.

To accommodate this increase in air traffic, airport stakeholders and policy-makers face challenging questions with strong interdependencies and often conflicting objectives in the areas of safety and security, efficiency and service, and environment. The decision-making process used to assess these questions involves the deployment of technical expertise and tools which help both parties arrive at a workable compromise. Despite a proven track record in the area of software development and application which support airport decision, there are still outstanding issues yet to be resolved. In particular, tools developed to date are not able to perform integrated impact and trade-off analyses between different performance measures in a user-friendly way.

In response to these decision-making requirements, the SPADE Programme was set up within the 6th Framework Programme of the EC to deal with Airport Efficiency issues: Phase 1 for the intial system development and Phase 2 for the final system realisation.

The main result of the Supporting Platform for Airport Decision-Making and Efficiency Analysis (SPADE) Programme is a user-friendly, fully tested decision-support system that enables airport stakeholders and policy makers to perform integrated impact analysis in the various levels of decision making through pre-structured paths and built-in, "wizard-type" navigation aids.

To view the SPADE (Phase 1) brochure, click here, and to view an introductory SPADE presentation, click here.

To view interactive demos of the two early prototypes of the system as developed in the SPADE Phase 1 Project, please click here and here.