Potential Impact of Operational Towing on Aircraft Emissions

In this paper, the emissions mitigation potential of implementing operational towing at major European airports is evaluated. Using mixed-integer linear programming, a scenario simulating mixed taxiing operations is used to find the relationship between fixed vehicle costs and target emission savings at an airport and European level. Using...

High capacity Continuous Descent Operations: A case study of Amsterdam airport Schiphol

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) and the European Commission (EC) have stated their desire for the aviation industry to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and in addition these emissions must be reduced by 45% in 2030. In order to reach these goals, all possible contributions to a reduction in carbon emissions are...

Improving climb and descent profiles in BlueSky using ATC performance models

Testing novel concepts in the allocation and use of aircraft is commonly done in air traffic simulators. Current day simulators rely on proprietary models and often propose questionable solutions. This paper uses BlueSky as simulator, in cooperation with performance models OpenAP and BADA. BlueSky aims to provide the user with full freedom to...

Improving Safety of Vertical Manoeuvres in a Layered Airspace with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Current estimates show that the presence of unmanned aviation is likely to grow exponentially over the course of the next decades. Even with the more conservative estimates, these expected high traffic densities require a re-evaluation of the airspace structure to ensure safe and efficient operations. One structure that scored high on both the...

Detecting ATC commands in ADS-B data: An exploratory research into ADS-B data to see if detecting ATC commands is possible

Automatic Dependent Broadcast-Surveillance (ADS- B) was introduced to increase the safety of air travel. Since then it has proven to be a useful source of air traffic data for academic research because it is publicly available. Another source of information are the communications between air traffic control (ATC) and aircraft. Methods are (being...

Root cause analysis of ATC delays: A case study on KLM flights at Schiphol Airport

Due to the continuous growth of air traffic up to the year 2020, the air transportation network has become more complex, and the airports and airspace busier. However, capacities have not grown at the same rate as air traffic, making Air Traffic Control one of the most encountered primary delays. A data driven approach is taken in order to...

Prototyping an efficient and cost-effective method to detect and mitigate random faults in COTS processors

Space has always been fascinating to humans, since the dawn of civilization. From the first astronomers and philosophers of ancient times, who looked at the night sky searching for answers, to the scientists and engineers of modern missions, commanding space probes to the edge of the solar system, space has always been at the epicenter of...

A Data-Driven comparison of Trajectory Prediction methodologies using ADS-B data

Better predictability of future aircraft locations will result in more efficient air-traffic management operations and therefore an increase in airspace capacity. However, flight paths tend to have a stochastic character causing their predictability to decrease with the look-ahead time. In this research a quantitative analysis is made of the...

Exploring reinforcement learning methods for autonomous sequencing and spacing of aircraft

Research on reinforcement learning algorithms to play complex video games have brought forth controllers surpassing human performance. This paper explores the possibilities of applying these techniques to the sequencing and spacing of aircraft. Two experiments are performed. First a single aircraft must learn to fly a 4D trajectory using only...

Robust model for operational stand and gate planning Schiphol

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of individually established buffer times, based on historical delay data, on the robustness of an operational stand and gate allocation schedule. Using flight schedules and the structural lay-out of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, a stand and gate allocation model is created using BEONTRA...

Weather-adaptive noise abatement procedures: Using optimal control theory

The most common operational measure in aviation to reduce the effect of environmental noise pollution is noise abatement procedures. Noise abatement procedures are recommended flying techniques based on noise optimal trajectories, which aim at reducing the noise impact on local communities as much as possible. Atmospheric...

ADS-B and Mode S Data for Aviation Meteorology and Aircraft Performance Modelling

With the increase in air traffic volume, aircraft are required to be equipped with a transponder by aviation authorities to increase the surveillance in air traffic control. These transponders transmit periodically Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) signals and by interrogation the Mode S signals. These signals can be received by...

Coordination in Multi-Actor Self-Separation in Complex Airspace Environments: A human-in-the-loop experiment using the Solution Space Diagram

The Air Traffic Management research community expects that the responsibility of maintaining a minimum safe separation distance between aircraft will move from the groundbased Air Traffic Control, a centralized system, towards the flight deck, a decentralized system. Previous research on the decentralized, also known as distributed Air Traffic...

Defining airspace quality: A new metric for defining air traffic situation quality in a defined airspace based on geometric traffic properties

Air traffic is growing every year and getting ever more complex. There is however no quick and robust way to analyze a traffic situation in an airspace and compare it to other, similar traffic situations. This research project proposes a new metric to compare air traffic situations in an airspace, based on geometric traffic data. The new metric...