AeroSCOPE: the first open-source database
How much CO2 is emitted each year by air transport between France and the United States? By aircraft departing from China? By type of aircraft?
A snapshot of CO2 emissions from air transport, country by country, region by region: that’s the painstaking work carried out by Antoine Salgas as part of his doctoral thesis at ISAE-SUPAERO. The result is AeroSCOPE, an interface based on an open-source database that covers all global emissions. “It’s an open-source tool that has no equivalent”, says the PhD student.
Attracted by the aeronautical sector, Antoine Salgas “became aware of environmental issues” during his engineering course at ISAE-SUPAERO, in particular through the Environmental Engineering Certificate, a module offered in 3rdᵉ year as part of a partnership with Airbus. It was therefore natural that he should take an interest in the work being carried out by Scott Delbecq and Thomas Planès at the Institute. AeroMAPS, the tool developed by these two researchers, aims to assess the environmental impact of the aviation sector and to make projections by playing on the levers to decarbonise the sector.
AeroMAPS, a reference tool for modelling decarbonisation scenarios in the aviation sector
Like many young people of my generation, I want to be a driving force behind an ecological transition that is vital for the future. Having joined ISAE-SUPAERO's engineering course in 2017 out of passion, it was natural for me to get involved in the aviation sector by joining the AeroMAPS development team. This tool enables us to take a step back from the various decarbonisation solutions proposed and evaluate them within prospective scenarios. My work provides an essential economic analysis, since many of the solutions envisaged generate additional costs. At the same time, I went to TU Delft to develop AeroSCOPE, a tool that enables us to regionalise our analyses: air transport is characterised by very different uses and dynamics around the world. These are fascinating subjects, tackled within a dynamic team, which gives a lot of meaning to my research.
Antoine Salgas PhD student in the Design and Operation of Aeronautical and Space Vehicles Department (DCAS) at ISAE-SUPAEROScott Delbecq, a lecturer and researcher in aeronautical systems design, and Thomas Planès, a lecturer and researcher in sustainable aviation and aircraft design, initially created this open-source platform for researchers to explore transition scenarios. To simulate the scenarios of the future, AeroMAPS has progressively integrated numerous parameters such as different aircraft models, different types of fuel and regulations.
This work is now part of the Institute for Sustainable Aviation, a multi-disciplinary research consortium founded on the initiative of ISAE-SUPAERO to work on the sustainable future of the aviation sector and to offer research, industry, decision-makers and the general public scientific tools and methods, without bias.
At the beginning of 2022, freshly graduated from ISAE-SUPAERO’s engineering programme, Antoine Salgas joined the AeroMAPS team to study the economic cost of each transition scenario for the aviation sector: “The different decarbonisation options do not have the same characteristics. For example, a more efficient aircraft is likely to be cheaper to operate; using more sustainable fuels will be more expensive than today,” he explains. “The first part of the thesis I am working on, in partnership with Toulouse Business School, concerns the development of models to quantify this.”
Once the environmental and economic impact of each scenario had been modelled on a global scale, the AeroMAPS team turned its attention to the geographical partitioning of the tool. “For an even more detailed analysis, we felt it was important to be able to propose scenarios on the scale of a region of the world, the EU for example, or a national scale. And even to be able, in the long term, to study the decarbonisation of an airline”, explains Antoine Salgas. This gave rise to the AeroSCOPE project, which was carried out during a three-month academic stay at the Dutch university of TU Delft, where the PhD student was hosted by researcher Junzi Sun.
To establish a database of CO2 emissions from air transport, Antoine Salgas referred to a real year, 2019, for which he set about finding all the relevant data. He drew up a manual inventory of global air traffic, region by region, company by company, aircraft type by aircraft type, before calculating the corresponding emissions.
To do this, “I began by looking at all the open data, as exists in the United States and Europe. It was more difficult for other regions of the world, such as Asia”. To make up for the lack of data, a solution was found via the Wikipedia platform. “We realised that it had a reliable framework, common to all the world’s airports, which enabled us to collect all the existing air routes.” Antoine Salgas then used a machine-learning approach to estimate the associated air traffic. From this work, he was able to draw up a map – a snapshot of CO2 emissions country by country.
As well as being a database of interest to researchers, industry and the general public, AeroSCOPE provides a projection basis for the AeroMAPS tool. “Thanks to the combination of the two tools, we can refine the scenarios and be much more precise about the decarbonisation solutions we can propose for each region”, notes Antoine Salgas. Linked to AeroMAPS, this tool is proving invaluable for exploring the possible futures of aviation, as a good example of the work being carried out at the Institute for Sustainable Aviation and in line with ISAE-SUPAERO’s commitment to mobilising its academic and scientific skills in support of the transition to a sustainable society.
Visit AeroSCOPE at https://aeromaps.eu/aeroscope.
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