Increasing airport efficiency: injecting new technology

Advanced surface movement guidance and control systems (A-SMGCS) - called airport surface detection equipment in North America - can potentially solve the airport capacity bottleneck while maintaining at least the current safety level. A-SMGCS are becoming increasingly sophisticated and play a major role in avoiding runway incursions. To investigate the feasibility of phasing in new technology to ease airport operations, the European Commission has funded several research projects. The latest project, called VISION (improVed aIrport A-SMGCS by integrated multisensor data fuSION), aims to apply all the technologies developed in previous projects, including A-SMGCS, to a set of real airports.