Airports

Convex Formulations of Air Traffic Flow Optimization Problems

Work, Daniel B.
Alexandre Bayen
2008

The problem of regulating air traffic in the en route airspace of the National Airspace System is studied using a Eulerian network model to describe air traffic flow. The evolution of traffic on each edge of the network is modeled by a modified Lighthill-Whitham-Richards partial differential equation. The equation is transformed with a variable change, which makes it linear and enables us to use linear finite difference schemes to discretize the problem. We pose the problem of optimal traffic flow regulation as a continuous optimization program in which the partial differential equation...

Multimodal Impact Analysis of an Airside Catastrophic Event: A Case Study of the Asiana Crash

Marzuoli, Aude
Boidot, Emmanuel
Feron, Eric
van Erp, Paul B. C.
Ucko, Alexis
Alexandre Bayen
Hansen, Mark
2016

Transportation networks constitute a critical infrastructure enabling the transfers of passengers and goods, with a significant impact on the economy at different scales. Transportation modes, whether air, road, or rail, are intrinsically coupled through passenger transfers and are interdependent. The frequent occurrence of perturbations on one or several modes disrupts passengers' entire journeys, directly and through ripple effects. This paper provides a case report of the Asiana crash in San Francisco International Airport (SFO) on July 6, 2013, and its repercussions on the multimodal...

EPTT-2018-0047 Recirculating Large-Scale Structures Inside the Cove of a Sealed Slat

Himeno, FHT
Amaral, FR
Souza, DS
Daniel Rodriguez
Medeiros, MAF
2018

The development on Environmental Regulations related to aircraft noise propagated to the vicinity of airports forced the industry to investigate the noise sources and look for alternatives of noise reduction. The current aircraft noise has a large contribution provenient from the airframe, due to the turbofan engine development. One can identify the most relevant sources as the landing gear, flap and slat. Since slat is distributed in almost whole extension it becomes a distributed noise source. The presence of excrescences inside slat cove can changes significantly the recirculating flow...

Cost Economics of Aircraft Size

Wei, Wenbin
Hansen, Mark
1993

The authors study the relationship between aircraft cost and size for large commercial passenger jets. Based on a translog model, they develop an econometric cost function for aircraft operating cost and find that economies of aircraft size and stage length exist at the sample mean of their data set, and that for any given stage length there is an optimal size, which increases with stage length. The scale properties of the cost function are changed considerably if pilot unit cost is treated as endogenous, since it is correlated with size. The cost-minimising aircraft size is therefore...

A Power Consumption Model for Multi-Rotor Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Liu, Zhilong
Sengupta, Raja
Kurzhanskiy, Alex
2017

We develop a theoretical power consumption model for multi-rotor Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), estimate the model parameters, and validate it by flying an IRIS+ quadrotor UAS and measuring its energy consumption experimentally. The model is derived from the helicopter literature. Such models are required to create UAS flight planning systems.

A Resource Allocation Algorithm for Multivehicle Systems With Nonholonomic Constraints

Rathinam, Sivakumar
Sengupta, Raja
Darbha, Swaroop
2007

This paper is about the allocation of tours of m targets to n vehicles. The motion of the vehicles satisfies a nonholonomic constraint (i.e., the yaw rate of the vehicle is bounded). Each target is to be visited by one and only one vehicle. Given a set of targets and the yaw rate constraints on the vehicles, the problem addressed in this paper is 1) to assign each vehicle a sequence of targets to visit, and 2) to find a feasible path for each vehicle that passes through the assigned targets with a requirement that the vehicle returns to its initial position. The heading angle at each...

A Safe Flight Algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Rathinam, S.
Sengupta, R.
2004

Military applications require unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) to travel in an unknown, hostile environment. Hence minimizing the damage of these UAVs is crucial to any mission. The objective of this paper is to develop control algorithms that help in keeping the UAV 'safe'. Safety implies that the UAVs are not damaged or destroyed during the mission. We present two algorithms that guide the forward motion of these UAVs and illustrate how this safe flight algorithm can be coupled with other path planning algorithms.

An Energy-Based Flight Planning System for Unmanned Traffic Management

Liu, Zhilong
Sengupta, Raja
2017

In this paper, we proposed an energy-based flight planning system for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM). Fuel consumption estimation at the flight planning stage is safety critical in general aviation, because energy-related failures are often life-threatening. However, conservative fuel estimation is not economical and environmentally friendly because carrying unnecessary fuel load burns a lot of extra fuel. The same reasoning holds in UTM. Aviation researchers are actively working on optimizing fuel loading, but such research is lacking in UTM. In this paper, we...

An Energy-Based Optimal Control Problem for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Planning

Liu, Zhilong
Kurzhanskiy, Alex
Sengupta, Raja
2017

In this paper, we formulate the flight planning problem for a multirotor Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) as an optimal control problem. The cost optimized is the energy consumption at the cruise phase of a mission. We first present a general formulation, then address a special cases: optimizing flight directions given vehicle speed. The problem was solved numerically on digital elevation models (DEM) with the Ordered Upwind Method (OUM). By combining the optimized path with timestamps, we can generate 4D trajectories typically used in aviation flight planning, and thus maximize the...

Cooperative and Non-Cooperative UAS Traffic Volumes

Bulusu, Vishwanath
Sengupta, Raja
Polishchuk, Valentin
Sedov, Leonid
2017

We describe an analytical process to determine how much UAS traffic is feasible. The process is a simulator and data processing tools. The two are applied to the US San Francisco Bay Area and Norrkoping, Sweden. The amount of UAS traffic is measured in flights per day and simulated up to 200,000 flights. A UAS traffic volume is feasible if specified metrics meet operational requirements with high probability and are stable, in the sense of being below thresholds observed for monotone properties in random geometric graphs. We focus on conflict cluster size and argue for it as a fundamental...