Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ANIMA (Aviation Noise Impact Management through Novel Approaches)

Teaser

Aircraft noise can adversely and severely affect the quality of life and public health of people living in the vicinity of airports. The overall objective of the ANIMA project (“Aviation Noise Impact Management through novel Approaches”) is to address this challenge by...

Summary

Aircraft noise can adversely and severely affect the quality of life and public health of people living in the vicinity of airports. The overall objective of the ANIMA project (“Aviation Noise Impact Management through novel Approaches”) is to address this challenge by developing new methodologies and tools to manage and mitigate the impact of aviation noise. More than a technological project aiming at lowering noise intensity at source, ANIMA is a people-oriented project. It aims at providing airports and authorities with proved solutions to improve the quality of life of residents living near airports in the prospect of increasing Europe’s capability to respond to the growing traffic demand. New tools and methodologies developed by ANIMA will be made available to various stakeholders (airports, local authorities, researchers, industries, local communities and EU policymakers) for allowing them to address these challenges (annoyance, health impact, land-use planning and consensus building).
To propose new ways for preventing and reducing the impact of aircraft noise on residents, ANIMA further takes into account the annoyance generated by aircraft noise by assessing the non-acoustical aspects, such as attitudinal, health or sociological effects, which have not been addressed enough in previous projects. To do so, the project actively involves communities neighbouring airports, who are the main stakeholders directly impacted by the noise issue.
Ultimately, the ANIMA project will produce a Best Practices portal dedicated to airports for effective management of noise impact. It will also provide local authorities and airports with an innovative and user-friendly Noise Management toolset facilitating impact-wise decision-making. This tool will, for instance, include annoyance simulations and trade-offs with current and future aircraft, allowing local authorities, land-use planners and airports to simulate the effect of changes on some parameters (related to land-use planning or aircraft types e.g.) on the annoyance experienced by local communities. ANIMA will also produce several tools to be used by local communities around airports such as virtual reality tools allowing them to experience existing but also possible future traffic scenario – possibly with new, noise annoyance-reduced aircraft – and a mobile application to express their related annoyance. Lastly, the project will support the coordination of research related to aviation noise at national and EU level and deliver a strategic roadmap for the future EU Aviation Noise research.

Work performed

Critical Review and Assessment of Noise Impact and Related Management Practices
• Existing noise reduction and mitigation strategies and interventions have been investigated and a critical review of Balanced Approach Implementation across EU Member States has been conducted.
• A thorough review of noise-related health impacts, annoyance studies and the role played by non-acoustic factors has been performed.
• Airport experience and wider literature for enhanced noise communication and engagement practice have been outlined. In a similar fashion, non-aviation sector experiences of noise management and the potential lessons for the aviation sector were reviewed.
• Interdependencies have been considered to better understand how airports can incorporate them more effectively into noise management decision-making.

Reducing noise impact and improving quality of life by addressing annoyance
• A detailed literature study has been carried out to increase insight into Quality of Life indicators for people living near airports.
• A communication campaign with focus groups is on track. A test focus group has already been organized early February 2019 in Manchester to test the format. Field studies on awakening indicators have been finished and analysis is on the way.
• To engage communities and enhance trust from residents towards authorities, preparations have started for a laboratory and an in-situ experiment by making use of the virtual reality simulation developed in the project.
• The development of a mobile app for both iPhone and Android phones is on schedule and the test version is being evaluated.
• For the examination of airport expansion and property values, an infrastructure is being established for the continuous collection and analysis of Twitter messages, where Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (SVM) are used to extract relevant tweets.
• For the collection of research data, work in the task has been focused on looking at the way to preserve the data, and to make sure it is in accordance with existing (ethical) guidelines applied to European research.

Toolsets Development and Scenarios assessment
• The development of a design toolchain and a noise management toolchain is on track. The various components of the toolchains have been developed and/or adapted and interfaces between them defined and implemented.
• A first round of scenario calculations has been initiated, which is used to test the various components and the interfaces, so as to put the whole toolchain in place.
• First mock-ups therefore exist for the Noise Reduction Solutions Simulator and the Virtual Community Tool. Both still require manual chaining between components.

Global Coordination of Aviation Noise Research Effort
• An initial scenario set has been defined, with which the toolchain developed in WP4 of the project can be tested. The methodology for the preparation, confection and validation of the Common Aviation Noise Research Roadmap has been developed, considering a new classification and pursuing a consistent format across the board. The process has been initiated resulting in a first set of roadmap subsets, covering the main topics for research.
• A first event was organized during which a European wide network of experts and research actors were convened and where the ANIMA roadmap process was detailed and discussed. The experts’ network has also expanded towards the Balkan region and initiated the development of a high-level roadmap of national efforts.
• An initial status of worldwide research addressing the full scope of the roadmap has been compiled. Contacts and exchanges relating to targeted international collaboration have been initiated with several countries.

Final results

ANIMA will deliver highly operational knowledge, tools and methods to be used by different stakeholders and have a positive impact on several stakeholders:
• Communities around airports (improved quality of life and wellbeing, active participation to decision making…)
• Airports and local authorities (empowered with decision-making capability through noise management toolset and best practices)
• Aeronautics industry (design toolset allowing them to take into account annoyance in future aircraft design and operations)
• Research community (large sets of data made available by ANIMA to the research community)
• Policymakers (aviation noise research agenda and evidence-based research results to orient future research, decision-making and regulation).
ANIMA’s outcomes are being disseminated all along the project through a very vivid communication and dissemination policy, popularizing concepts issued from research and exemplifying how the aviation noise-related annoyance ought to be coped with.

Website & more info

More info: https://anima-project.eu/.