A priority of any aircraft flight is safety, with risk at its highest during take-off and landing. Air traffic controllers have relied on the National Airspace System, known as NAS, data system to keep track of countless moving variables all while at the mercy of weather, scheduling and the occasionally inevitable delay.
Traffic management systems are designed to account for information based on aeronautical instrumentation, the environment, intrinsic variabilities, and human factors across the country, requiring a sophisticated level of processing power.
The structure behind air traffic control systems is expected to evolve significantly in upcoming years through the incorporation of artificial intelligence and the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles. As new software is developed to tackle such large-scale data analysis, researchers are exploring how to optimize safe flight systems to minimize risk and delay.
Yongming Liu, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, and director of the Center for Complex System Safety, received funding from the NASA University Leadership Initiative to create, a novel air traffic management software platform, which will be adopted for domestic air travel in the upcoming decade.
Data-driven flights
Liu and a team of collaborators across multiple institutions are taking a proactive management approach to the nation’s evolving airspace system when developing their new software, PARAATM, or Prognostic Analysis and Reliability Assessment for Air Traffic Management. The software integrates artificial intelligence as well as radar and GPS signaling.
“We are among the first few groups to have access to this very large database shared by NASA,” Liu says. “By using the data to make predictions and action planning to mitigate the risk, it has turned out to be very successful.”
A cornerstone of their platform is to manage the human factor errors that compound risk, particularly among human air traffic controllers. Nancy Cooke, a professor in human systems engineering for The Polytechnic School, part of the Fulton Schools of Engineering, says that focusing on the impact of human behavior is vital to mitigate risk as the industry undergoes these major shifts.