Demonstrating compliance for military aircraft using AI: A Big Industries & Eurocontrol Success

Big Industries was part of the team that developed a tool for EUROCONTROL that received an award at the Integrated Communications Navigation and Surveillance (I-CNS) 2025 conference resulting in an IEEE publication. A big thank you for the fruitful collaboration and good working atmosphere provided by civil-military experts at Eurocontrol Ricardo Oliveira and Velina Zaimova and ML expert Grigori Gustin.

What is the context?

Aircrafts (also military) landing at an airport need to prove they follow certain rules during final approach/landing (called Performance Based Navigation: https://www.icao.int/safety/pbn/pages/overview.aspx). This is where Eurocontrol's civil-military experts come into play. For military aircrafts, proving compliance is not trivial: it can require expensive validation exercises, installation of extra equipment and can face practical issues (e.g. limited cockpit space in fighter jets)

What is this project about?

Instead of physically proving compliance (all these jets burning kerosine), Eurocontrol wondered: "can we do it using Machine Learning (ML)?" We predict using ML what the route would look like if the aircraft had installed the expensive equipment.

We created as 'end product' a tool with:
  -INPUT=certain flight/aircraft type/date/airport
  -OUTPUT 1= simulation of what the route would like if it had been recorded using the more expensive equipment
  -OUTPUT 2= compliancy: PASSED/NOT PASSED

So what was Big Industries' role?

We researched and proposed the ML techniques that can solve this challenge.We used historical flight paths available in the EUROCONTROL Datalake that Big Industries has already been involved with for a number of years
-provided both data engineering and data science support

How about the tech?

• AI/ML platform-> Cloudera Machine Learning (recently renamed Cloudera AI)
• ML technique-> neural networks suited for time series prediction called LSTMs (Long short-term memory )
• Neural net library ->pytorch

So, was there any result?

The testimonial was accepted to the I-CNS conference. The team won an award at the conference -> see pic (we all got one of those :-) ) and the paper was published in IEEE Xplore: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10976785?
We received a honourable mention by the head of unit for civil-military coordination on his linkedin page.

Just give me a fun fact?

For its 25th anniversary the conference was organized the first time outside the US. The first editions were hosted at a NASA Research Center.