Repositioning in shared mobility systems: Combining model predictive control and approximate dynamic programming

The global market for personal mobility has transformed over the last decade. Traditional taxi services have to compete with the emergence of ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft. Rapid developments in available algorithms and real-time inter-connectivity of travellers and vehicles offer mobility-on-demand (MOD) services new possibilities...

Conjugate Dynamic Programming

In decision making problems, the ability to compute the optimal solution can pose a serious challenge. Dynamic Programming (DP) aims to provide a framework to deal with a category of such problems, namely ones that involve sequential decision making. By dividing the original control problem into sub-problems and solving it backwards in time,...

Lookahead Approximate Dynamic Programming for Stochastic Aircraft Maintenance Check Scheduling Optimization

This paper proposes a lookahead approximate dynamic programming methodology for aircraft maintenance check scheduling, considering the uncertainty of aircraft daily utilization and maintenance check elapsed time. It adopts a dynamic programming framework, using a hybrid lookahead scheduling policy. The hybrid lookahead scheduling policy makes...

Online reinforcement learning control for aerospace systems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are relatively new in the field of aerospace guidance, navigation, and control. This dissertation aims to exploit RL methods to improve the autonomy and online learning of aerospace systems with respect to the a priori unknown system and environment, dynamical uncertainties, and partial observability. In the...

Multi-period adaptive fleet planning problem: with Approximate Dynamic Programming

This MSc thesis presents a stochastic modelling approach to the multi-period airline fleet planning problem. Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) is used to model the impact of demand uncertainty on fleet decisions. The proposed ADP algorithm applies local value function approximations resulting from Gaussian kernel regressions to estimate...

Emergency Trajectory Management for Transport Aircraft

Over the years gradually flight management systems have been added to airplanes which reduce pilot workload and increase safety. These systems however do not provide an adequate response when in an emergency situation the aircraft loses all thrust. A system that creates glide trajectories to airports that are reachable would enable pilots to...