Partner Spotlight: CRIDA

About CRIDA and their role in RESPONSE

CRIDA is a leading Spanish research and innovation company specialising in air traffic management (ATM). It was created as a joint initiative of ENAIRE, INECO and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) to bring together operational knowledge, technological expertise and academic excellence. CRIDA focuses on developing, validating and transferring advanced ATM concepts that improve safety, efficiency, capacity and sustainability of air navigation services in Europe.

Within the RESPONSE project, CRIDA’s team is responsible for the ground-side perspective of the Concept of Operations (CONOPS). Their role is to define how air traffic control operations evolve when higher levels of automation are introduced to support safe return-to-land scenarios involving highly automated and autonomous aircraft. They analyse how controllers interact with automated tools, how responsibilities are distributed between humans and machines, and how procedures and roles should adapt to these new operational environments.

Current Research: developing the ground-side Concept of Operations

CRIDA is currently focused on the development of the ground-side CONOPS for RESPONSE. This work aims to define how air traffic controllers will manage safe return-to-land operations when different levels of automation are introduced, from today’s largely human-driven procedures to highly automated future scenarios.

In parallel, they are developing the Ground Digital Assistant (GDA), which is a key enabler of the ground-side concept. This tool represents the operational embodiment of the CONOPS and provides automated support functions to air traffic controllers, such as information aggregation, decision support and coordination with airborne systems. The GDA implements cutting-edge technology using machine learning algorithms and will be used during the validation exercises of the project to assess how controllers interact with advanced automation and how it supports them during critical safe return-to-land situations.

Contributing to concept maturity and operational safety

CRIDA’s work provides the foundation for understanding how higher levels of automation will affect air traffic control operations during safe return-to-land scenarios. These tasks contribute to increasing the maturity of the solution. It helps identify potential operational risks, human-automation interaction issues and opportunities for performance improvement at an early stage. Ultimately, this supports the project’s goal of demonstrating that safe, efficient and human-centred automation can be introduced on the ground side to enable future highly automated and autonomous aviation operations.

Research Challenges and Solutions

One of the main challenges in RESPONSE is the lack of historical operational data for highly automated and autonomous aviation systems. RESPONSE, as an exploratory level project (TRL-2), is dealing with cutting-edge technologies and concepts that have not yet been deployed in real-world operations, which makes it difficult to rely on past experience or established procedures.

To overcome this, CRIDA has placed strong emphasis on the involvement of air traffic controller expertise from the very beginning of the design phase. Their operational knowledge is essential to identify realistic needs, constraints and potential risks that may not be obvious from a purely technical perspective. By continuously engaging controllers in the development of the CONOPS and the Ground Digital Assistant, it’s possible to ensure that the concepts remain operationally meaningful and practically usable.

In addition, the use of an iterative design and development approach in which concepts and tools are progressively refined based on expert (ATCOs) feedback, reduces uncertainty and increases confidence in the proposed solution.

Impact on the Future of European Aviation

European aviation has always evolved through collaborative research and innovation, and RESPONSE is expected to play an important role in shaping the future of highly automated operations. The project provides a structured framework to explore how increasing levels of automation can be safely introduced for both airborne and ground operations, particularly in critical scenarios such as pilot incapacitation and/or technical failures.

The results of RESPONSE will contribute to building confidence in advanced automation, showing how human operators and intelligent systems can work together in a safe and effective way. This is essential for the future integration of autonomous and highly automated aircraft into European airspace.

The CRIDA team expects RESPONSE to act as a foundation for new research initiatives, operational concepts and regulatory discussions related to automation in aviation.

CRIDA is proud to contribute to RESPONSE by bringing the ground operational perspective of air traffic control into the heart of the project. They are confident that their work is helping ensure that future automation is not only technologically advanced, but also safe, human-centred and operationally viable.