Improving Airport Surface and Terminal Airspace Operations via Strategic Decision-Making with Explicit Consideration of Tactical Recourse (Feedback Control)

John-Paul Clarke, Sc.D.
College of Engineering Dean’s Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology

Airport surface and terminal airspace operations are frequently subject to congestion and delays that are symptoms of our current operating paradigm. For example, unless there is severe airport surface congestion, departing aircraft are typically allowed to leave their gate and continue with minimal regulation to the takeoff queue. Similarly, en route aircraft are typically allowed to continue with minimal regulation to the terminal airspace above their destination. I present three algorithms for minimizing congestion and delays while fully utilizing available resources — runways, taxiways, ramps, and gates. In the first algorithm, airspace congestion is minimized (thereby minimizing flight time, fuel burn, emissions, and noise) by determining the separation required between successive aircraft prior to their descent to the runway so that each aircraft can execute a continuous descent arrival with little to no controller intervention. In the second algorithm, ramp congestion is minimized by determining the optimal assignment of flights to concourses based on historical statistics and then assigning flights to specific gates based on nearer-term landing time forecasts. In the third algorithm, runway utilization is maximized by determining the optimal initial schedule for operations on a runway given uncertainty in taxi out times and the corrective re-sequencing to account for adverse FIFO sequences.

About the Speaker:

John-Paul Clarke is a College of Engineering Dean’s Professor at Georgia Tech, where he has appointments in Aerospace Engineering and Industrial and Systems Engineering, and serves as Director of the Air Transportation Laboratory. His research interests include aircraft trajectory prediction and optimization–especially as it pertains to the development of flight procedures that reduce the environmental impact of aviation–and the development and use of stochastic models and optimization algorithms to improve the efficiency and robustness of airline, airport, and air traffic operations. His research has been particularly instrumental in changing both the theory and the practice of flight procedure design. Professor Clarke was co-Chair of the National Academies Committee that developed the US National Agenda for Autonomy Research related to Civil Aviation, and is a member of the NASA Advisory Council Aeronautics Committee. Over the years, he has chaired or served on advisory and technical committees chartered by the AIAA, EU, FAA, ICAO, NASA, the National Academies, the US Army, and the US DOT. Dr. Clarke received the S.B., S.M., and Sc.D. degrees from MIT in 1991, 1992, and 1997, respectively. His many prior honors include the 1999 AIAA/AAAE/ACC Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award, the 2003 FAA Excellence in Aviation Award, the 2006 National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lectureship, the 2012 AIAA/SAE William Littlewood Lectureship, and the SAE Environmental Excellence in Transportation Award in 2015. He is a Fellow of the AIAA, and is a member of AGIFORS, INFORMS, and Sigma Xi.