Context

The Aviation Emissions and evaluation of Reduction Options Modelling System (AERO-MS) is a bespoke software developed to examine the environmental and economic impacts of a wide range of policies intended to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from international and domestic aviation. The types of policies AERO-MS can model include technological, operational and market-based measures. Since EASA obtained the Intellectual Property Rights for AERO-MS in 2009, the tool has been applied for policy-impact assessments in about 35 studies and research projects.

Overall objective and expected outcome

The objective of this framework contract is to update and enhance AERO-MS and thereby increase the European modelling capability for a wide range of future aviation policy assessments. 
The extended and updated capabilities of AERO-MS will be used for policy decisions at European level as well as at the ICAO level. The main users of the upgraded AERO-MS tool will be the European Commission, EASA, Member States and research centres.

Main tasks and deliverables

The update and enhancement of AERO-MS are carried out through three consecutive specific contracts (SCs): SC01, SC02, and SC03.

The objective of SC01 was to carry out a scoping / gap analysis of policy assessments through:

• Review of state of the art relating to aviation environmental policy assessment and data sources;
• Review of emerging environmental policy assessment needs in Europe and at international level, which are not yet covered by the current AERO-MS model, as well as of other existing tools to assess such policies;
• Review of user experiences, capability limitations and potential improvements;
• Review of the model security and proposed improvements.

Based on these reviews, 33 potential improvements to AERO-MS were identified, with the update of the AERO-MS Base Year (to 2019) as the single essential one.

With the 17 highest ranked potential improvements identified in SC01 as the prime candidates for implementation, SC02 assessed this subset of potential improvements by addressing for each:

• Main steps for implementation (if selected for implementation); 
• Estimation of effort and data-acquisition cost for implementation (if selected for implementation).

Based on this assessment, core recommendations were presented to EASA.

Based on the outcome of SC02, EASA selected 9 main improvements for actual implementation in AERO-MS, as included in SC03 of the project:

• Update the AERO-MS Base Year from 2006 to 2019 (including an extension of AERO-MS time horizon to 2070 and an update of AERO-MS regionalisation);
• Update price elasticities of demand in AERO-MS;
• Add non-volatile particulate matter (nvPM) and particulate matter (PM) to the AERO-MS emissions inventory;
• Improve the AERO-MS function for data export;
• Specify in AERO-MS detour factors by flight stage;
• Better align AERO-MS with PRIMES-TREMOVE;
• Promote more (fixed, assumption) variables to scenario level in AERO-MS;
• Include impacts of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) (and alternative propulsion systems) and related policies in AERO-MS;
• Improve AERO-MS model security.

At the end of SC03 both a Dissemination Event on the updated AERO-MS will be organised, primarily for European Commission (EC), EASA and Member States, and a training on the updated AERO-MS will be given to EC, EASA and Member States staff.

For further information on AERO-MS, please contact AEROMS [at] easa.europa.eu