Air traffic maximization for the terminal phase of flight under FAA's NextGen framework

Twu, Philip; Chipalkatty, Rahul; Rahmani, Amir; Egerstedt, Magnus; Young, Ryan C.

doi:10.1109/dasc.2010.5655490

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…This paper extends previous work on distributed merging and spacing for the terminal phase of flight (i.e., [13] and [14]) to allow for mixed fleets of aircraft, where having heterogeneous aircraft implies that the spacing distances depend on the types of aircraft present. For example, the Boeing 747 is a large aircraft that requires a greater inter-aircraft separation distance than a small plane like the Canadair CRJ700.…”

Section: The Bargaining Technique Of Monotonic Concessionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Merging and Spacing of Heterogeneous Aircraft in Support of NextGen

Chipalkatty

Twu

Rahmani

et al. 2012

Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics

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FAA's NextGen program aims to increase the capacity of the national airspace, while ensuring the safety of aircraft. This paper provides a distributed merging and spacing algorithm that maximizes the throughput at the terminal phase of flight, using information communicated between neighboring aircraft through the ADS-B framework. Aircraft belonging to a mixed fleet negotiate with each other and use dual decomposition to reach an agreement on optimal merging times, with respect to a pairwise cost, while ensuring proper inter-aircraft spacing for the respective aircraft types. A set of sufficient conditions on the geometry and operating conditions of merging forks are provided to identify when proper inter-aircraft spacing can always be achieved using the proposed algorithm for any combination of merging aircraft. Also, optimal decentralized controllers are derived for merging air traffic when operating under such conditions. The performance of the presented algorithm is verified through computer simulations.

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Section: The Bargaining Technique Of Monotonic Concessionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Merging and Spacing of Heterogeneous Aircraft in Support of NextGen

Chipalkatty

Twu

Rahmani

et al. 2012

Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Dual Decomposition is an emerging tool for optimizing costs in multi-agent systems (eg [12], [13]). It allows each agent to maintain its own version of the variables that it needs for optimization and ensures the equality with its neighbors' versions through the introduction of Lagrange multipliers.…”

Section: A Dual Decompositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal decentralized gait transitions for snake robots

Droge

Egerstedt

2012

2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

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Snake robots are controlled by implementing gaits inspired from their biological counterparts. However, transitioning between these gaits often produces undesired oscillations which cause net movements that are difficult to predict. In this paper we present a framework for implementing gaits which will allow for smooth transitions. We also present a method to determine the optimal time for each module of the snake to switch between gaits in a decentralized fashion. This will allow for each module to participate in minimizing a cost by communicating with a set of modules in a local neighborhood. Both of these developments will help to maintain desired properties of the gaits during transition.

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“…An important construct in enabling new air traffic operations is ensuring that the system provides the agents with the flexibility necessary to robustly respond to disruptions and disturbances, while increasing overall system capacity [3]. As clearly defined in [4], the IM concept involves an air traffic controller issuing an IM clearance to a candidate aircraft.…”

Section: Near-term Interval Management Concept Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of aircraft models and integration schemes for interval management in the tracon

Neogi

Hagen

Herencia-Zapana

2012

2012 IEEE/AIAA 31st Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC)

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Reusable models of common elements for communication, computation, decision and control in air traffic management are necessary in order to enable simulation, analysis and assurance of emergent properties, such as safety and stability, for a given operational concept.Uncertainties due to faults, such as dropped messages, along with nonlinearities and sensor noise are an integral part of these models, and impact emergent system behavior. Flight control algorithms designed using a linearized version of the flight mechanics will exhibit error due to model uncertainty, and may not be stable outside a neighborhood of the given point of linearization. Moreover, the communication mechanism by which the sensed state of an aircraft is fed back to a flight control system (such as an ADS-B message) impacts the overall system behavior; both due to sensor noise as well as dropped messages (vacant samples). Additionally simulation of the flight controller system can exhibit further numerical instability, due to selection of the integration scheme and approximations made in the flight dynamics.We examine the theoretical and numerical stability of a speed controller under the Euler and Runge-Kutta schemes of integration, for the "Maintain" phase for a " Mid-Term (2035-2045 Interval Management (IM) Operational Concept" for descent and landing operations.We model uncertainties in communication due to missed ADS-B messages by vacant samples in the integration schemes, and compare the emergent behavior of the system, in terms of stability, via the boundedness of the final system state. Any bound on the errors incurred by these uncertainties will play an essential part in a composable assurance argument required for real-time, flight-deck guidance and control systems,. Thus, we believe that the creation of reusable models, which possess property guarantees, such as safety and stability, is an innovative and essential requirement to assessing the emergent properties of novel airspace concepts of operation.

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Air traffic maximization for the terminal phase of flight under FAA's NextGen framework

Cited by 4 publications

References 13 publications

Merging and Spacing of Heterogeneous Aircraft in Support of NextGen

Merging and Spacing of Heterogeneous Aircraft in Support of NextGen

Optimal decentralized gait transitions for snake robots

Comparison of aircraft models and integration schemes for interval management in the tracon

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