Project manager Florent Birling has been interviewed for the last issue of CleanSky Newsletter: “In Clean Sky, you develop new R&D solutions that will have a final use in the industry. The Clean Sky projects are therefore more end user driven”. Simet Project Team at GTD Florent how would you define GTD? GTD is a leading Spanish SME providing software and system engineering in the space, aeronautics, defence and energy sectors. Over the last 20 years, GTD specialized itself in the development of critical software for the ground segments and for the embedded systems. Our developments cover a range of activities from control centres for the Ariane 5 launchers to the development of the Mission Management Computer for the A400M. In the last R&D projects, we focused in the processing of weather data and in the atmospheric awareness. What is your European R&D background? We started to participate in European projects in 1998 with a project related to remote sensing and multi-sensors data fusion for the mines detection. Today, we are particularly active in the aeronautics sector with the participation in the FP7 Alicia project and in the energy sector with the FP7 HiPerDNO project. We have also participated in various ESA and ITEA projects. Our interest in Clean Sky was as a result quite straightforward. Last April, we kicked off our second project called Neural to evaluate the potential benefit of neural networks for improving the performance to the data access of the FMS. What are you developing in the Simet project? We have developed an indexed weather repository with several years of atmospheric conditions related to wind, pressure, temperature, humidity and other variables. With this solution you can easily search the atmospheric scenarios you need and send these conditions to your simulator. The final user, Thales Avionics Toulouse, will then be able to develop new mission and trajectory systems that will reduce the emissions and the noise through better aircraft trajectory optimization. Are other SMEs involved in Simet? The Simet consortium is composed of a public organism Météo France and 3 SMEs. The other two SME’ cooperating with GTD are Atmosphere and USE2ACES. Atmosphere is based in Toulouse and completes the weather expertise in our consortium. USE2ACES, formed by test and airline pilots based near Amsterdam adds crew expertise and supplies operational points of view. What do you like in the Clean Sky initiative? Compared to other European frameworks projects like FP7, in the Clean Sky initiative, you develop new R&D solutions that will have a fi nal use in the industry. The projects are therefore more end user driven, thanks to the follow-up of the ITD Managers. The Clean Sky calls for proposals are generally smaller than the FP projects and offer therefore more possibilities for an SME to build a consortium and coordinate a project. Do you foresee further exploitation of your development? Yes, we think that the weather solution developed in Simet allows to go further to a product, and such a potential product is generating a lot of interest in the simulation market. We have therefore presented our solution last May in Cologne at ITEC, the biggest European simulation exhibition. The feed-back of the end users, distributors and simulator owners was very positive and encouraging to update our solution to a commercial product. For more information: http://www.gtd.es http://www.cleansky-simet.org/
