CLEANSKY (now succeeded by CLEANSKY 2) is one of the EC’s Joint Technology Initiatives and the world’s largest and forefront programme aiming to reduce the environmental impact of the commercial air transport industry. It is therefore a high-profile programme that enjoys significant international exposure. The core team consists of the European industrial primes such as Airbus, Rolls Royce, Safran, Thales and Liebherr. The University of Malta was involved in CLEANSKY at Associate Member level, a tier of participation which included only one Maltese and four UK stakeholders within the whole programme.

The University of Malta contributed significantly to the drafting of the CLEANSKY work programme associated with theoretical trajectory optimisation studies within the Systems for Green Operation (SGO) Integrated Technology Demonstrator (ITD), an activity worth in the order of EUR 15 Million and involved participation and contributions of other partners including Airbus, Thales Avionics, Alenia Aermacchi, Selex Galileo, EADS-IW, NLR, DLR and Delft University of Technology. Its inputs contributed to the definition of these participations as well as to the drafting of the Description of Work (DOW). The DOW described the development plan of GATAC - a multi-objective, multi-parameter optimisation tool with which theoretical studies of trajectory optimisation can be performed, as well as the theoretical optimisation studies that were to be carried out within the scope of the seven-year contract. The development of GATAC and ensuing theoretical studies formed a major part of the Mission and Trajectory Management activities within the SGO ITD.

Since the formal start of the programme in 2008, the University of Malta was heavily involved in the technical development of GATAC within the ITD. GATAC is a complex tool that is capable of handling models and modules written in different programming languages and has a graphical user interface that facilitates the user’s task of defining the mathematical problem at hand. Cranfield University developed optimisation modules and various models whilst the University of Malta developed the integration framework, which is the core software that hosts all the modules and models.

Prof. Ing. David Zammit Mangion directed the teams of both universities, which worked in close cooperation. Several versions that reflect the progressive development of the tool were released, with Version 4 released in January 2015. A major milestone in the development programme was achieved in the first quarter of 2013, when Version 3 of GATAC passed the TRL 5 gate following review by industrial primes and other major partners in the project. The GATAC development programme was nominated for a 2013 ATC Global Excellence Award.