Olivia J. Pinon

Optimizing Pushback Decisions to Valuate Airport Surface Surveillance Information

As airport surface surveillance technologies develop, aircraft ground position information becomes more easily available and accurate. This paper provides a better understanding of the value of future surface surveillance systems where departures, and more specifically pushback times, will be optimized. It analytically quantifies the potential benefits yielded by providing surveillance information to the agent or system that is entrusted with tactically optimizing pushback clearances under nominal conditions. A stochastic model of surface operations is developed for single-ramp surface operations and calibrated to emulate departure surface operations at LaGuardia Airport. Two levels of information are examined within a tactically optimized collaborative decision-making framework. For each level, emissions, number of taxiing aircraft, and runway utilization rate are analyzed and compared with a simple threshold policy to evaluate surface surveillance information. Safety benefits, however, are not considered in this paper. It is estimated that optimally controlling pushback clearances from a single-ramp area using detailed surface surveillance information does not provide significant benefits when compared with controlling pushback clearances using a gate-holding policy based on the number of aircraft currently taxiing. However, when the runway is functioning at intermediate capacity (50%-72% runway utilization rates), e.g., under adverse weather conditions, surveillance information may improve optimization of departure operations. In such case, emissions and the number of taxiing aircraft are reduced by up to 6% when compared with the gate-holding policy and by up to 3% when compared with the performance of an intelligent operator with limited information.

A METHODOLOGY FOR THE PARAMETRIC EXPLORATION OF THE IMPACT OF PRODUCTION PLANNING ON THE EARLY STAGES OF DESIGN

The increasing use of advanced composite materials in recent aircraft programs calls for new ways to conduct design. This paper presents a methodology that brings manufacturing and production considerations in the early stages of aircraft design as a means to help alleviate some of the new design challenges that the aircraft manufacturing industry is facing. In particular, this paper discusses how the proposed methodology integrates surrogate modeling techniques with visual analytics capabilities to provide the designer with a better understanding of the interface and trades that exist between performance, manufacturing, and production at the later stages of Conceptual design. A composite redesigned F-86 Sabre wing-box is used as a proof-of-concept for this research.

An Overview of Design Challenges and Methods in Aerospace Engineering

Today’s new designs have increased in complexity and need to address more stringent societal, environmental, financial and operational requirements. Hence, a paradigm shift is underway that challenges the way complex systems are being designed. Advances in computing power, computational analysis, and numerical methods have also significantly transformed and impacted the way design is conducted. This paper presents an overview of the challenges and enablers as they pertain to the Conceptual, Preliminary and Detailed design phases. It discusses the benefits of advances in design methods, as well as the importance of visualization and knowledge management in design. Finally, it addresses some of the barriers to the transfer of knowledge between the research community and the industry.

On the value of information within a collaborative decision making framework for airport departure operations

As airport surface surveillance technologies develop, aircraft ground position information becomes more easily available and accurate. The value of these technologies, and more particularly the value of surface surveillance information, can be derived from the operational enhancements they provide within Air Traffic operations. This article provides a better understanding of the value of surface surveillance systems within tomorrows collaborative framework, where departures, and more specifically push-back times, will be collaboratively optimized. It quantifies analytically the potential benefits yielded by providing surveillance information to the agent which is entrusted with tactically optimizing push-back and taxi clearances under nominal conditions. This work proposes a novel approach to the valuation of surveillance information. A stochastic model of surface operations is developed and calibrated to emulate departure surface operations at LaGuardia Airport. Two levels of information are examined within a tactically optimized Collaborative Decision Making framework. For each level, emissions and number of taxiing aircraft are analyzed in order to determine the value of surveillance information. Safety benefits, however, are not considered in this paper. It was estimated that surface surveillance information could improve optimization of departure operations, by reducing emissions and the number of taxiing aircraft by 5.7%, without impacting the runway utilization rate.

A Data Mining and Visual Analytics Perspective on Sustainability-Oriented Infrastructure Planning

The research presented in this paper focuses on developing a multi-scale, integrated environment that supports situational awareness, optimization, as well as forecasting and virtual experimentation at the campus level. One of the key features of this research is its ability to extend beyond the common data-driven load-forecasting exercise and integrate System-of-Systems (SoS) level predictive capabilities to enable the aforementioned functionalities. FORESIGHT, an interactive campus data browser designed to handle any visual analytics tasks on real-time data streams is presented.

Supporting Affordability-Based Design Decisions in the Presence of Demand Variability

In the years since the Cold War, the aerospace industry has seen a shift towards affordability-based design from the primarily performance-based designs of the past era. While many techniques, such as IPPD and PLM, have been implemented in support of this shift, recent developments in the industry have led to major cost overruns and production delays. The increased prevalence of demand variability in the aerospace industry and the difficulty to rapidly adapt production plans are a primary cause of these issues. Furthermore, traditional aircraft designers perform detailed manufacturing cost analysis late in the design process when the majority of the program costs are already committed. With the recent shift to more composite aerostructures, historical regressions and cost estimating relationships used to predict cost and manufacturability are no longer accurate, so postponing more detailed cost analyses to later design phases can lead to high costs due to sub-optimal early design decisions. The methodology presented in this paper addresses these problems by providing the ability to conduct multi-disciplinary trades in the early stages of design, when a large amount of design freedom and cost savings opportunities exist.To enable these multi-disciplinary trades, this paper describes how aircraft performance considerations are integrated with production rate, manufacturing cost, and financial planning metrics into a parametric, visual trade-off environment. The environment, combined with a multi-objective optimization routine, facilitate effective affordability-based trades during the early stages of design. An F-86 Sabre redesigned wingbox using 3 separate manufacturing concepts is used as a proof-of-concept for this research.Copyright

Harmonizing European and American Aviation Modernization Efforts Through Visual Analytics

The successful development and implementation of both European and American aviation modernization programs require active cooperation, harmonization, and interoperability among air transportation systems. Although significant efforts have beenmade toward collaboration and synchronization, additional work is required to harmonize capabilities, terminology, assumptions, standards, and implementation schedules. This paper presents a rigorous approach and visual environment to instantaneously examine and compare the components of both European and American programs and to further identify and understand the nature of their relationships. In particular, it provides a unique and interactive means to investigate and compare both programs, roadmaps, terminologies, and definitions.

A METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH FOR AIRPORT TECHNOLOGY EVALUATION AND SELECTION

As airports are becoming the major capacity bottleneck to continued growth in air traffic, it is primordial to make the most efficient use of the current, and very often, underutilized airport infrastructure. The research presented in this paper thus proposed to address the increase in air traffic demand and resulting capacity issues by considering the implementation of operational concepts and technologies at underutilized airports. However, determining which technologies or operational concepts to implement to assist airports in meeting their future needs is a challenging task. To address this point, a methodology is proposed that associates multicriteria technology selection techniques to an ongoing small airport simulation effort helping airport managers to make more informed decisions with regards to technology investments.

A Visual Analytics Approach to the Qualitative Comparison of the SESAR and NextGen Efforts

The development and implementation efforts of both NextGen and SESAR programs are based on the realization that active cooperation, harmonization, and interoperability among systems is essential and necessary for both SESAR and NextGen to be successful. While significant efforts have been made towards collaboration and synchronization, additional work is required to harmonize capabilities, terminology, assumptions, standards, and implementation schedules. This paper builds on previous efforts to facilitate the harmonization between NextGen and SESAR. It presents a rigorous approach and visual environment which enable a comparison of the components of both programs, and further support the identification and understanding of the nature of their relationships. In particular, this paper provides a means to look and compare both SESAR and NextGen programs, roadmaps, terminologies and definitions.

A System Dynamics Approach to the Evaluation of Airport Technology Portfolios

This paper proposes an approach to the evaluation of airport technology portfolios. The work leverages the benets yielded by impact assessment techniques and system dynamics modeling to support the successful and sustainable deployment of technologies at secondary and regional airports. In particular, it emphasizes the importance of understanding and identifying technology causal relationships and further discusses the potential of Cross Impact Analysis to do so. It later presents a System Dynamics model aimed at helping the decision maker understand the circumstances that drive the need for capacity expansion. Finally this paper discusses avenues for future work towards airport technology investment decisions.