The 4th ICARUS Plenary meeting was held on March 13th-15th, 2019, hosted by the Athens International Airport (AIA) in Athens. The agenda of the meeting was structured along 5 main slots: (a) general activities part, (b) technical presentations and brainstorming (spread across the 3 days), (c) the demonstrators’ part, (d) impact creation slots, and (e) a tour in the Athens International Airport.

Day 1

The plenary meeting kicked off with an extensive project presentation in order to provide an overview of all ICARUS activities to the Ethics Advisory Board member that attended the meeting. Perspectives on data analytics, linking and sharing in aviation were discussed and the ICARUS positioning and the key results till now were outlined. The main discussion points were also set to the table to underline the critical need for certain decisions to be taken to ensure the proper project implementation.

The initial technical slot followed, with dedicated presentations of the ICARUS platform architecture and the development status for the alpha platform release. Upon the brief technical part introduction, the demonstrators (AIA, PACE, ISI and CELLOCK) were presented, consisting of: the demonstration scenarios, the data availability and needs profiling, the analytics algorithms to address the scenarios, the test cases to be executed on the ICARUS platform, the current considerations / limitations, the anticipated benefits and impact and the demonstrator timeplan. Discussions were held per demonstrator to check the feasibility and added value of each demonstrator scenario to the aviation data value chain, providing feedback on restructuring the scenarios in certain cases. The proposed evaluation scenario was outlined by the respective deliverable leader and significant constructive feedback was provided by the partners. The meeting concluded its first day with the necessary preparations for the demo booth in the IATA Aviation Data Symposium that ICARUS has secured.

Day 2

The 2nd meeting day started with various administrative issues, ranging from quality management and financial reporting to the periodic review meeting agenda. Then, an exploitation workshop was held and featured an overview of different exploitation concepts and decisions to be taken. Critical exploitation questions, related to the operation, sustainability and future commercialization of the ICARUS platform, were put to the table and parallel groups worked on the value proposition canvas and discussed the business model canvas.

Then, a WP1 slot took place to discuss the progress in the methodology update, the preparation of the ICARUS aviation ontology, and the finalization of the MVP and the data collection activities while the WP2 slot on the ICARUS big data framework was skipped due to time restrictions and since the respective WP2 deliverables have been already submitted. The dissemination, communication and stakeholders’ engagement activities in WP6 concluded the presentations of the 2nd day and it was emphasized that they need to be significantly strengthened since the beta platform release will become soon available. Finally, the Ethics Advisory Board members present in the first 2 days of the meeting provided feedback and recommendations on the ICARUS project.

Day 3

During the last day of the meeting, a technical session was held to: (a) navigate to and discuss the ICARUS platform front-end (through detailed mockups), (b) present in detail the platform and the different components’ functionalities, related requirements, the open issues / technical challenges and the in depth-development plan (for the beta release and the releases 1.00, 1.50 and 2.00) by the respective technical partners. Apart from the different inherent constraints that have come up, the necessary interfaces among the components as well as the technology stack were also mentioned. Upon summarizing the action plan and immediate actions after the plenary meeting, a very interesting and insightful tour on the inner, restricted premises of the Athens International Airport from the air traffic control tower and the operations centre to the airport apron and the baggage handling system, was provided by the AIA colleagues.

The next critical milestone for the ICARUS project is the IATA Aviation Data Symposium to be held on June 25th-27th, 2019 in Athens and the consortium is working under the clock to ensure its on-time beta platform release and the AIA and PACE demonstrators will have their preliminary results ready for demonstration.