Tutorials

Aircraft Trajectories Complexity Metrics (9h00 AM, duration: 3 hours)

The ATM complexity metrics consist in measuring the level of difficulty associated to a given traffic situation. There is a real need for this type of metrics in the context of the following applications: airspace comparison, evaluation of new ATM concept, controller action analysis (before and after control, sectoring and (or) sector grouping, traffic assignment, congestion pricing, evaluation of airspace organization scheme, implementation of flexible use of airspace policies, implementation of tactical ATFM strategies, etc.
This tutorial will first present a survey of the current ATM complexity metrics and then focus on the intrinsic trajectories complexity metrics. In this framework, two classes of metrics will be presented:

• Geometrical complexity metrics
  Metrics are computed at a given time from a radar data set (position and speed). Each metric identifies a typical feature of the traffic such as: density, disorder of speed vectors, convergence, etc. They can be computed on a map or aggregated on a real value for a given airspace.
• Metrics based on trajectories
  Metrics use trajectory segments (not only information at a given time) and adjust a non linear space-time dynamical system model to the observation (trajectory segments). Based on this dynamical system model, trajectory disorder metrics may be computed on a map by the mean of Lyapunov exponent computation or may be aggregated in a single real value. Those maps give the level of disorder of trajectories in a given area of the airspace. Exemple will be given on the real French airspace.

Instructors: Dr. Daniel Delahaye and Dr. Stephane Puechmorel (Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile)

• Daniel Delahaye is doing research in the Applied Mathematical Laboratory at ENAC (French Civil Aviation University). He obtained his engineer degree from the ENAC school and did a master of science in signal processing from the national polytechnic institute of Toulouse in 1991. His obtained his PH.D in automatic control from the aeronautic and space national school in 1995 and did a post-doc at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT in 1996. He conducts research on mathematical optimization for airspace design and traffic assignment and works on air traffic complexity for more than 12 years.
• Stephane Puechmorel is the head of the Applied Mathematics Laboratory of the French Civil Aviation University (ENAC). He grad- uated from the Polytechnique school and obtained his master degree in signal processing in 1990 and his Ph.D in pure math in 1992 from the national polytechnic institute of Toulouse. He conducts research on algebraic topology and geometry of trajectories. He also infers new models for air traffic complexity.

Aviation and the Environment: Methods and Issues (9h00 AM, duration: 3 hours)

The objective of this tutorial is to train aviation engineers and researchers on the most recent advances in science and engineering related to aviation and the environment. The tutorial will provide an overview of the environmental issues in aviation, and discuss quantitative methods for analysis of aviation environmental impacts in the areas of emissions, noise, and fuel efficiency.
Major open research issues also will be discussed. Principal topics to be discussed include:

• Physics and chemistry of aviation-related environmental effects
• Metrics
• Modeling techniques
• Mitigation of impacts
• Environmental management

Instructor: Dr. Terry Thompson (Metron Aviation)

• Dr. Terry Thompson leads environmental research for Metron Aviation. He has been technical director of the FAA's Noise Integrated Routing System (NIRS) for regional environmental assessment, and Principal Investigator for NASA's NAS-wide Environmental-Impact Model (NASEIM). He currently leads efforts in surface/terminal environmental management, and supports JPDO NextGen environmental-analysis activities. He is a member of the JPDO Environmental Working Group, the Partnership for Air Transportation Noise and Emission Reduction (PARTNER), and the George Mason University Center for Air Transportation Systems Research. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Biophysics from the University of Rochester.

Managing congestion at major US Airports (9h00 AM, duration: 3 hours)

This talk will discuss the modeling tools necessary to study the impact of policy alternatives on congestion at major US airports. The talk will show how a general Operations Research background that includes: optimization, queueing theory, game theory, simulation, economics, statistics, and good data analysis skills are necessary to obtain an overall understanding of the problem and the consequences of alternative solutions.

Instructor: Dr. Karla Hoffman (George Mason University)

• Karla Hoffman received her BA in Mathematics from Rutgers University in 1969, and an MBA and Doctor of Science in Operations Research from George Washington University in 1971 and 1975, respectively. She is currently Full Professor in the Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department, the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering at George Mason University. She was the department Chair from 1996-2000. Previously, she worked as a mathematician in the Operations Research Department of the Center for Applied Mathematics of the National Institute of Standards and Technology where she served as a consultant to a variety of government agencies.
  Dr. Hoffman has published extensively in professional journals, edited two books on operations research-related subjects, and served on a variety of editorial boards. Dr. Hoffman has always advocated working on practical problems, and her consulting activities have included crew and fleet scheduling algorithms for the airline industry, real-time scheduling algorithms for truck and bus transportation systems, and capital budgeting tools for a major telecommunications company. Her interest in combinatorial auctions has led to consulting arrangements with the Federal Communications Commission on auction design for spectrum auctions and with the Federal Aviation Administration, where she is studying the use of auctions and congestion pricing for slot allocation at congested airports. Her research has been funded by The National Science Foundation, The Office of Naval Research, NASA, and the FAA.
  In 1984, she was awarded the Applied Research Award of the National Bureau of Standards for her research in solving large combinatorial optimization problems. This award is the highest honor awarded to a scientist in the non-measurement sciences and the first time that award was provided to a mathematician. The same year, she received the Commerce Department Silver Medal Award for meritorious service. In 1989, Dr. Hoffman received the Distinguished Faculty Award of George Mason University. In 2002, she was elected a Fellow of INFORMS and in 2005, she received the George E. Kimball Medal. In 2006, She was the Omega Rho Honor Society Arnoff Lecturer on the Practice of Management Science.

Optimization through Simulation: How to improve TMA operations (2h00 PM, duration: 3 hours)

Complexity becomes apparent to humans each time we are asked to take a decision in a context that it is not possible to predict all the consequences of a certain action. In the Air Traffic Managemnt (TMA) context, present regulation submits procedures to a narrow human supervision. Most of the conflicts that appear are managed by the controllers in a tactical phase, characterized by a poor agility and efficiency. The short term decisions introduce new perturbations airlines forecast, decrease the airport capacity and propagate problems to other airports.
As it is noted in SESAR and NGATS, TMA’s are facing new challenges of capacity and efficiency, where strategic aspects should be considered when automating the tactical decisions, integrating the surface movement management decisions together with the air side problem scheduling. The process of planning the efficient, cost effective flow of airplane arrivals and departures considering not only infrastructure capacity constrains (ie. taxiways, available passanger terminals, fingers, etc.) but also passenger and airline quality factors is considered now a day a complex problem to be solved. New technologies and infrastructure equipments support high flexibility resulting in a wide range of options in the planning stage.
Flexibility can lead to benefits but can also lead to idle/oversaturated resources and earliness/tardiness in airline operations. The difference between getting benefits or loss might depend on the decision making activity. Due to the economical consequences of each strategic and operational decision, in this tutorial a modeling approach that supports operational, strategic and tactic decisions by analysing the cause-effect relationship of any decision represented in a simulation model will be introduced. Numerical examples and applications are given to illustrate the methods.

• Flexibility: when is needed? how to avoid non productive operations?
• How to tackle complexity using Simulation Models as DSS to optimize strategic, tactical and operation decisions.
• The use of AI search methods to improve structured knowledge represented in Simulation Models
• Characterizing TMA actors relationships as cause-effect decission propagation
• Illustrative example : How to optimize the coordination of airside (trajectories) and landside resources.

Instructor: Dr. Miquel Angel Piera (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)

• Dr Miquel Angel Piera i Eroles received his MSc (Control Engineering) from the University of Manchester Institute of Technology in 1990 and his PhD degree on Computer Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB, Spain) in 1994. Professor Piera has led several industrial projects related with modelling, simulation and optimization of transport systems. He was the Conference Chairman of the 20th European Modeling & Simulation Symposium (EMSS 2008) that was held in Barcelona in 2006, and has been involved actively in the organization of several national and international conferences.
  Professor Piera has been during the last 5 years involved in the Air Transport Field as a head of the "Aeronautical Management" studies at the UAB, and recently published a modelling and simulation book that is being used for teaching in many Spanish universities. He participates in industrial research projects in the logistics and air transport field and at present he is Co-director of LogiSim, a Modelling and Simulation Institution sponsored and founded by the local government of Catalunya.

Safety Analysis of Terminal Operations (2h00 PM, duration: 3 hours)

As demand for air transportation grows, increasing pressure is applied to bring aircraft in closer and closer proximity near the terminal. This has the potential to degrade safety of air traffic operations. This talk presents quantitative methods for assessing safety near the terminal to address issues such as runway incursions, wake vortex encounters, and collisions.

Instructor: Dr. John Shortle (George Mason University)

• John Shortle is an associate professor of Systems Engineering and Operations Research at George Mason University. He is a member of the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research at GMU and a member of the Center for Network Based Systems. His research interests include simulation and queueing applications in air transportation and telecommunications. Previously, he worked in the telecommunications industry at US WEST Advanced Technologies. He received a B.S. in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College in 1992 and a Ph.D. and M.S. in operations research at UC Berkeley in 1996. In 2000, he received the Daniel H. Wagner Award for Excellence in Operations Research Practice.

Task Usability Analysis for Air Traffic Management Automation (2h00 PM, duration: 3 hours)

The objective of this tutorial is to train students to conduct a formal Task Usability Analysis for tasks to be performed on complex automation such as tools used in command-and-control for Air Traffic Control and Flow Management. The Human Factors method to be trained is specifically designed to measure Training (Trials-to-Mastery) and Operational Probability of Failure-to-Complete a task.
The course is intended for System/Software/Hardware developers actively involved on the design, coding and test of complex automation. Upon completion of the tutorial, attendees will be able to:

• Conduct a Task Usability Analysis for complex command-and-control automation.
• Identify Tasks.
• Identify Operator Actions
• Identify Cues for Operator Actions
• Identify Salience of Cues for Operator Actions
• Interpret estimates of Trials-to-Mastery and Probability of Failure to Complete a task

Instructors: Dr. Lance Sherry and Mrs. Maricel Medina (George Mason University)

• Dr. Sherry is and Associate Professor - Research at George Mason University. He is a system engineer and analyst with over 20 years of practical experience in air transportation operations and the design/flight-test/certification of commercial avionics. Dr. Sherry has served as control engineer, system engineer, lead system engineer, avionics flight test engineer, and program manager. He has served as Principal Investigator for research in operator-automation interaction (e.g. cockpit, dispatch, command-and-control) and Human Factors. The results of this research have been applied at United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Boeing-Commercial Aircraft Group, Honeywell – Air Transport Systems, Rockwell-Collins, Smiths Industries, and Metron Aviation. Dr. Sherry has published over 70 papers and articles. He holds several patents and has submitted several invention disclosures. He has also won several awards for his work. He is currently Executive-Director for the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research (CATSR) at George Mason University.
• Mrs. Medina is a software engineer with over 10 years of practical experience in software development, software testing, and project management. She has been pioneer in software testing in Costa Rica, Central America. She has also worked as assistant research in usability patterns and requirements specifications at Fraunhofer Institute fur Experimentelles Software Engineering in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Mrs. Medina has provided different workshops, and participated as guest speaker in Software Testing and Software Quality Control. She has consulted several software companies in process improvements, and software quality control strategies and methodologies. Mrs. Medina is currently a Graduate Research Assistant for the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research (CATSR), and graduate student in the M.Ed. Instructional Technology and Design at George Mason University.

Airline Flight Planning (Trajectory Design) (9h00 AM, duration: all day)

Each and every flight operation has a specific purpose, business or mission aim, which is expressed in a Business (or Mission for the military) Trajectory.” (Source: SESAR Consortium, D3: The ATM Target Concept, September 2007) The SESAR Concept of Operations outlines a renouncing of the airspace-based ATM approach and an embracing of a trajectory-based manner, the Business Trajectory.
To research and work efficiently in the flight operations domain, it is essential to understand the underlying principles of the current flight planning procedure, as performed by airlines for every single flight during the planning phase (dispatch).
The tutorial reviews the basics of the airline flight planning process striving the areas of airspace design, flight performance, navigation and weather. The participants are invited to develop an Operational Flight Plan (OFP) covering the 4 D Flight Profile and Weight & Balance for a specific international flight mission. The student will receive a comprehensive briefing pack and is guided step by step through the process (e.g. create a minimum time and fuel track, perform optimum altitude analysis and come to an 3D ATC trajectory, calculate required fuel and over flight fees, check weight limitations). The conditions and constraints of the flight planning procedure should be explored and discussed. The tutorial closes with a discussion evaluating any potential changes needed to that process to cope with the Business Trajectory expectations.

Instructor: Hartmut Fricke

• Hartmut Fricke studied Aeronautics and Astronautics at Technische Universitat (TU) Berlin from 1985 to 1991. From 1991 to 1995 he was a research fellow in Flight Operations, Airport Planning and ATM at TU Berlin, where he completed his Doctor thesis in ATM (ATC-ATFM Interface). In 2001 he finished his Habilitation (professor qualification) on “Integrated Collision Risk Modelling for airborne and ground based systems”. This includes HIL experiments with an Airbus 340 full flight simulator in co-operation with the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre (EEC). Since December 2001 he has been Head of the Institute of Logistics and Aviation; and Professor for Aviation Technologies and Logistics at TU Dresden. In 2006 he was appointed Member of the “Board of Academic Advisors to the Federal Minister of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs” in Germany.