The FAA/EUROCONTROL Coordination Committee was established in December 1995 during the second FAA/EUROCONTROL Research and Development (R&D) Symposium, held in Denver, Colorado. The focus of the FAA/EUROCONTROL Coordination Committee was to define priorities in terms of common actions and agendas of both organizations. The Committee identified areas of mutual interest where the FAA and EUROCONTROL could work together in R&D and defined several R&D cooperative tasks, which are referred to as 'Action Plans'.

The goal of Action Plan 5 (AP5) is to determine a unified strategy for validating and verifying the performance, reliability, and safety of Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems. One objective of Action Plan 9 (AP9) is to promote a mutual understanding between the U.S. and Europe on the use and development of fast-time simulation models for modelling of air traffic operational concepts. An objective shared by AP5 and AP9 is to develop detailed best practices for performing tasks associated with the verification and validation of ATM systems. The development and subsequent use of these best practices will allow for sharing of information and comparison of results among all researchers. Best practices covering the use of metrics, data collection, data analysis, and reporting are useful for each type of validation exercise, as they take into account several factors including resources, cost, and most importantly, prior 'lessons learned.'

In order to capture lessons learned from a range of research organizations, several workshops and technical interchange meetings have been conducted. The attendees of these workshops and meetings included experienced practitioners in their respective fields and in the topics presented. Results from the workshops and meetings have been compiled into white papers which are available on this website.