A scenario-based approach to develop representative traffic environments for operational aircraft evaluation

Combining scenario techniques and operational aircraft evaluation provides the potential to quantify plausible but highly uncertain future developments of required environment parameters for operational evaluation of aircraft concepts. It is crucial to assess these new concepts in their potential operational environment to enable efficient air transport in the future. One of the main steps in the presented approach takes into account cluster analysis methods to determine representative sets of environment parameter values on a global scale. This reduces the wide range of operational parameter values to typical groups and enables a holistic operational evaluation assessment. The abstraction and standardization is followed by a scenario process, leading to multiple qualitative future developments which serve as an input to determine plausible future developments of relevant parameters. The complex causality evaluation and quantification needs to be performed individually for each environment parameter and concludes the presented concept.