The Departmental Seminar Series is open to all. U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering graduate students and faculty are especially encouraged to attend.

Title: Spectral Models for Air Transportation Networks


Abstract:
Air transportation networks are canonical examples of highly interconnected and complex systems. Furthermore, these societal-scale infrastructures generate large amounts of data upon which decisions regarding operational safety, efficiency, and reliability must be made. Therefore, understanding the characteristics of performance measures such as air traffic delays is critical for developing ways to mitigate their significant economic and environmental impacts. I will focus on network behavior and performance during disruptions (e.g., thunderstorms, nor’easters, hurricanes), and discuss how airport delays can be viewed as graph-supported signals, amenable to a variety of spectral and graph signal processing-based methods. Through this analysis, I characterize the spatial distribution of delays across a network of airports, highlighting key differences in delay dynamics between different types of disruptions and among different airline networks. I will then touch on some recent work regarding low-dimensional representations of airport network delays and how to use these representations to develop control and traffic flow management strategies. Finally, I will discuss some interdisciplinary research directions of interest to me, such as the integrated modeling of air-surface multi-modal transportation networks and emerging aerospace mobility systems (e.g., UAS/AAM).

Bio:
Max is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor and will be starting as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2022. He is also currently at MITRE’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) as a National Airspace System Senior Data Scientist. Max received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021. He earned his MSE in Systems Engineering and BSE in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, both from the University of Pennsylvania, in 2018. Broadly, he is interested in the analysis, control, and optimization of networks and networked processes, signal processing over irregular domains and manifolds, and geometric/topological data analysis, with an eye towards applications in air transportation systems and other societal-scale networks. He is the recipient of the Federal Aviation Administration RAISE Award (2018), a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2018), and the Wellington and Irene Loh Fellowship from MIT (2019), as well as several best paper awards from ICRAT and the ATM R&D Seminar, two joint FAA- Eurocontrol conferences.