Up in the air: Barriers to greener air traffic control and infrastructure lock-in in a complex socio-technical system

Spinardi, Graham

doi:10.1016/j.erss.2014.11.006

Cited by 17 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Network externalities occur when the usefulness of a technology increases with the number of its use cases. Increasing returns and network externalities can explain why inferior technologies persist in markets, e.g., VHS instead of beta max [85], or why there are human instead of automatised operators of air traffic control systems [9]. Each society has its own way of doing things.…”

Section: Institutional Design Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An even larger level of analysis has been applied in Olsson [7] or in Kanda, et al [8] where the STS lens is used to identify potential for wider environmental improvements by combining technological and non-technological factors. Known characteristics of STS that make them difficult to reshape eventually towards more sustainability are lock-in and lock-out effects, path dependencies or knock-on effects [9,10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conceptualising Design Fixation and Design Limitation and Quantifying Their Impacts on Resource Use and Carbon Emissions

Wasserbaur

Sakao

2020

Sustainability

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Design for sustainability needs to apply a societal perspective. The purpose of this paper is to combine the concept of design fixation with higher levels of analysis. Design fixation is used to describe a blind adherence to known concepts during the design process. It is used mostly at the micro level of design with the focus on the activities of an individual designer or a group of designers. In this paper, design fixation gets conceptually lifted to the levels of the organisation and the institution. We ask how the understanding of design fixation helps to achieve higher resource efficiency. Examples of organisational and institutional design fixations are presented. A System Dynamics model is used to simulate the impacts of design fixation on resource use of a sociotechnical laundry systems. Applying this lens suggests that in order to solve societal design fixations, systemic parameters like infrastructure, business models, or policies need to be considered design parameters. The simulation results show that high-level design fixations can have significant impact on resource use.

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Section: Institutional Design Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising Design Fixation and Design Limitation and Quantifying Their Impacts on Resource Use and Carbon Emissions

Wasserbaur

Sakao

2020

Sustainability

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“…Actually, different kinds of traffic advisor have been developed since the 1990s in the U.S. and Europe, such as the Center-TRACON Automation System (CTAS) and the Final Approach Spacing Tool (FAST) [1]- [3]. However, for a long time, the acceptance of automation by controllers has been a bottleneck for successful implementation of automation in air traffic control units [4]. In en-route airspace, the key question of free flight is whether the airborne self-separation can safely accommodate the very high traffic demand [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy Optimization in Automated Point Merge Trajectory Planning: An Artificial Intelligence-based Approach

Liang¹,

Weigang²,

Delahaye³

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE/AIAA 38th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC)

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Air traffic management is a complex decision making process. Air traffic controllers decision on aircraft trajectory control actions directly lead to the efficiency of traffic flow management. This paper aims to realize an automated routine trajectory management in terminal manoeuvring area with an intelligent decision making agent. An artificial intelligence based approach is applied to adaptively and smartly integrate four types of deconflict actions for resolving conflicts. Especially, the reinforcement learning policy optimization process is discussed in detail. Firstly, application of reinforcement learning in adaptive trajectory planning is presented. The entire problem is adaptively divided into several sub-problems. For each sub-problem, an online policy is applied to guide the simulation and optimization modules to find out the conflict free and less delay solution. The online policy is a scale of weight distribution for choosing desirable actions. It follows the rule of roulette wheel selection with weighted probability. The highest desirable decision variable has the largest share of the roulette wheel, while the lowest desirable decision variable has the smallest share of the roulette wheel. Direct policy optimization algorithm is designed to update the online policy. Finally, experiments are built up for validation of the proposed policy optimization algorithm for the intelligent decision making process. The results in the test environment showed that learning agent with different exploration and exploitation ability will result in different system performance in conflict resolution and delay.

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“…The current system displays many characteristics of a socio-technical system in some form of lock-in with a large and invested set of skills which imbues confidence in the existing set of practices (Kay 2006;Antonson andÅ kerskog 2015 andSpinardi 2015).…”

Section: Institutional Arrangementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lyons and Davidson (2016;104) refer to this as ''regime-compliant'' planning. There is, of course, significant investment and knowledge built up around the existing ways of working and therefore a variety of costs associated with change (North 1990;Spinardi 2015). Work on transport planning in Sweden found ''slow implementation of new notions, methods and scientific knowledge when practice is building mostly on experienced knowledge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutional issues in planning for more uncertain futures

Marsden

McDonald

2017

Transportation

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Future travel demand has always been difficult to estimate. Recent trends of a slow down or stagnation in traffic growth combined with substantial demographic, economic, and technological shifts further complicate that task. This poses a significant planning challenge given that decision-making is often based on the benefits of infrastructure investments which accrue over periods as long as 60 years. In contrast to the changing ideas around what mobility in the future will look like and the types of demand it may need to service, the practice of forecasting future travel demand remains largely unchanged as do the decision-making processes which flow from this. Alternative approaches to thinking about futures such as scenario planning exist but have had more limited deployment in the transport sector. This paper explores the institutional issues surrounding the purpose, practice and barriers to changing the approaches of forecasting and decision-making through an exploration of the state of practice in the UK drawing on interviews with 23 practitioners. Drawing on Hall's work on policy change, the research finds that there is a strong policy paradigm built around the relationships between transport investment and traffic growth. This has strengthened since the recession with an increased focus on the relationship between transport and job creation. The forecasting approaches in use today are an important part of a complex decision-making apparatus reflective of specialized policy arenas like transport. Challenges in acknowledging, representing and communicating uncertainty are identified leaving a growing tension between planning visions and planning practice. We conclude by reflecting on events which may stimulate a broader reframing of how we plan for transport futures whilst embracing key uncertainties.

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Up in the air: Barriers to greener air traffic control and infrastructure lock-in in a complex socio-technical system

Cited by 17 publications

References 29 publications

Conceptualising Design Fixation and Design Limitation and Quantifying Their Impacts on Resource Use and Carbon Emissions

Conceptualising Design Fixation and Design Limitation and Quantifying Their Impacts on Resource Use and Carbon Emissions

Policy Optimization in Automated Point Merge Trajectory Planning: An Artificial Intelligence-based Approach

Institutional issues in planning for more uncertain futures

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