The aim of COMPETE (COMPutationally empowered Electromagnetic industrial TalEnts) is to bridge the gap between the mindset and needs of advanced electromagnetics industry and the academic doctoral programs forming electromagnetic modelers designers and innovators. Standard doctoral programs in computational electromagnetics provide solid theoretical and algorithmic background, but are often abstract and far from the on-the field industrial needs. Several key elements of the industrial processes related to sensitivity of key devices, associated costs, relaiability and benchmarking of results are often discovered much later by the PhD student, and often European doctoral curricula in this field results less competitive than those of PhD awarded candidates from other systems like the North American one. This training, will instead provide since the very beginning a very pragmatic prospective on the current industrial needs in modelling and will form and educate a cohort of young scientists and innovators in the field of industrial computational electromagnetics.

Cancer is a global problem with 14.1 million new cases occurring annually and an expected increase of 68% by 2030. Ensuring effective and safe treatment remains a significant challenge for healthcare organisations. Studies have shown proton therapy to be effective in treating many types of tumours, including tumours of the prostate, brain, head and neck, central nervous system, lung, and gastrointestinal system as well as cancers that cannot be removed completely by surgery. Proton therapy is the most advanced type of external-beam radiation therapy that uses protons at high energy to destroy cancer cells. Proton therapy is routinely used for cancer treatment however it is limited by the sheer size and expense of the systems. There are currently only 66 operational proton therapy facilities in the world, addressing only 3-5% of clinical demand. LPT is developing a proton therapy system that overcomes the presented challenges, saving up to 50% space and reducing costs by up to 75%. LPT applies a patented approach to particle acceleration and beam delivery, combining nanotechnology with Nobel- Prizewinning ultra-high-intensity lasers and advanced magnetics. These technological breakthroughs enable meaningful reduction in the size, complexity and cost of proton therapy systems that will enable the widespread adoption of proton therapy both across Europe and globally. The technology is supported by the Horizon 2020, SME instrument. The LPT project aims to take the innovation to the next level through the collaboration of strong industrial and academia players. Together, HIL applied medical, THALES Optronique and INFN, will achieve fundamental milestones in the development of the commercial system, namely PT-100. This system will be constructed based on the Alpha system (developed with the support of SME instrument), with a higher repetition rate and proton flux to enable clinical use and wide market adoption.

The DYN-MARS project aims to minimise the environmental footprint of flights during climb, descent and approach through novel avionic functions and improved arrival routes and procedures. It enables, for the first time, a complete holistic solution that combines airborne with Air Traffic Management (ATM) improvements connected by enhanced communication capabilities. DYN-MARS builds on previous SESAR work through the development of the permanent resume trajectory function, the concept of dynamic deployment of arrival route structures, the DYNCAT project’s Flight Management System (FMS) energy management function and new air–ground data exchanges in order to enable the visibility of the flight plan at both ends. The DYN-MARS solution will consist of both an enhanced FMS for aircraft and new airspace management techniques for Air Traffic Control (ATC). This solution opens the path for more environmentally friendly routing of aircraft in the terminal manoeuvring area whilst maintaining today’s safety level. Based on the uplink of dynamically assigned routes and other information, DYN-MARS aims to allow pilots to better plan their optimum vertical and speed profile in descent and approach while maintaining the required runway throughput. Downlink of the FMS computed trajectory allows for further improvement in the trajectory optimisation process between the aircraft and ATC. Increased flexibility in ATM will make it possible accommodate these optimised flight profiles. DYN-MARS will conduct 5 different exercises to validate its solution from both avionics and ATM points of view with related human performance aspects. DYN-MARS includes relevant aspects of air traffic management with new aircraft flight procedures to sustainably reduce the environmental impact of aviation (CO2, fuel burn and the noise exposure of communities) whilst supporting the demand for high airport capacity and without compromising safety standards.

Global Navigation Satellite System Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) services have been increasing the airspace capacity, efficiency and safety and continue to proliferate and support more and more performance-based navigation operations. In the event of GNSS interference or outage, many GNSS enabled PNT services will be lost and the existing legacy navigation aids (VOR, DME, NDB and Secondary Radar) do not meet performance requirements nor maintain adequate capacity and efficiency. Therefore, a disruption to air traffic operations is expected to occur. Due to this disturbing reality and considering the growth of the worldwide air traffic, continuous, robust/resilient and high precision alternative positioning, navigation and timing (APNT) services and technologies are needed to maintain flight operations with the required level of performance while ensuring safety and security. Current solutions for APNT comprise of ground-based infrastructures transmitting non-GNSS signals-in-space to avionics. However, all these solutions cannot be used by small aircraft without major reengineering of their avionic systems. The NAVISAS Consortium will propose a novel concept of APNT for small aircraft that will integrate novel technologies and will merge multiple navigation avionics into one with no major impact on avionics. Specifically, NAVISAS is devoted to combine multiple GNSS constellations (GLONASS, GPS and Galileo) and a novel concept of atomic micro-gyroscope based on atomic spin and nuclear magnetic moment precessions, and to assess the improvements in performance and security. The technology of these gyros relies on a similar cell used for miniature atomic clocks, and will allow bridging the gap between the price of navigation grade gyroscopes and the market constraints for affordable non-inertial navigation systems and avionics in small aircraft, thus contributing significantly to enhancement of the flight safety level.

DYNCAT aims at enabling more environmentally friendly and more predictable flight profiles in the TMA, namely on approach, by supporting the pilots in configuration management. Approach and take-off operations at busy airports are virtually always less noise and fuel efficient than possible due very rigid constraints imposed on the flight profiles by ATC (concerning both vertical profiles and speed regimes), but also due to lack of support to the pilots for dealing with given restrictions/constraints and actual weather in the optimum way. Current FMS functionalities do not support configuration management very well, only a simplified, static high-lift sequence with a fixed order is available. The adequacy of actual procedure flown depends very much on the pilots' skills, but also on their access to information such as actual wind situation and ATC intents. Objectives: • analyse impact of current mismatch of aircraft and ATC procedures on flyability (pilot workload, safety) and environmental impact (fuel burn and CO2; noise) • propose amendments to on-board and ground procedures including identification of necessary enablers (technical, regulatory) • quantify ecological and economical potential of proposed improvements, including the prediction of 4D Trajectories, through exemplary analysis and early prototype simulation of newly designed configuration management functionality The study will be done exemplarily using the A320 family as reference aircraft and the development of new FMS functionalities for the optimisation of the high-lift system sequencing during approach as use case. Access to recordings of actual flight operational data, associated ATC instructions issued, weather data and noise measurements for a large number of operations in Swiss airspace on one hand and the implementation of the improved functionalities on an industrial test platform on the other allow for high validity and relevance of the results.