Air Traffic Sector Research Articles

The Impact of Digitalization on Air Traffic Evolution and Measures of Reducing CO2 Emissions

Abstract In the past couple of decades, the field of digitalization has grown in popularity. Given the substantial amount of research supporting its significance, it can be stated that this phenomenon manages to make its presence felt in any field at the moment, including the air traffic sector. The discussed effects may be seen in almost every element of air transport, whether it is the performance of the aircraft or the passengers' experience from the moment of ticket purchase to the completion of the flight. Between 2009 and 2019, air passenger revenue worldwide increased by 63%, from 374 billion $ to 612 billion $. Before COVID-19, air travel increased significantly. As part of the fourth industrial revolution, the digital transformation manages to change organizational paradigms and working practices while improving performance. Having this in mind, we aimed to identify the impact of digitalization in air flights domain, and what measures could be applied to reduce CO2 emissions. A bibliometric study of the previously conducted research in the area was performed using the Biblioshiny library, based on a set of extracted articles pertinent to the effects of digitalization on the aviation field. The viewpoints of this research emphasise the benefits of digital transformation and highlight the necessity of digitalization in all industries, particularly air traffic.

Air Traffic Sector Network: Motif Identification and Resilience Evaluation Based on Subgraphs

Air traffic control systems play a critical role in ensuring the sustainable and resilient flow of air traffic. The air traffic sector serves as a fundamental topological unit and is responsible for overseeing and maintaining the system’s sustainable operation. Examining the structural characteristics of the air traffic sector network is a useful approach to gaining an intuitive understanding of the system’s sustainability and resilience. In this paper, an air traffic sector network (ATSN) was established in mainland China using the complex network theory, and its motif characteristics were analyzed from a microscopic perspective. Additionally, subgraph resilience was defined in order to describe the network topology by analyzing changes in subgraph motif concentration and subgraph residual concentration. Our empirical findings indicated that motifs exhibit high connectivity, while anti-motifs are found in subgraph structures with low connectivity. The motif concentration of subgraphs can efficiently reflect the distribution of heterogeneous subgraph structures within a network. During the process of resilience evaluation, the subgraph motif concentration remains relatively stable but is sensitive to the transition state of the network from disturbance to recovery. The resilience of the system at the macroscopic scale is aligned with the resilience of each heterogeneous subgraph structure to some extent. Topological indicators have a more significant impact on the resilience of the ATSN than air traffic flow characteristics. This study has the outcome of uncovering the preference for connection among nodes and the rationality of sector structure delineation in ATSNs. Additionally, this research addresses the fundamental mechanism behind the network disturbance recovery process, and identifies the connection between network macro- and microstructure in the resilience process.

Importance sampling for probabilistic prognosis of sector-wide flight separation safety

This study develops a probabilistic simulation methodology for the en-route safety assessment of multiple aircraft flying within an airspace sector. This assessment is affected by multiple sources of uncertainty, such as external inputs such as wind gust, internal factors such as aircraft component failure, and model errors (e.g., in the aircraft dynamics model) and variability in observed trajectories. The concern is to evaluate whether any pair of aircraft fail to maintain a minimum required lateral separation, and the safety assessment problem involves the prognosis of separation violations between all possible aircraft pairs within the sector, over a duration of interest. Some of the uncertainty sources are modeled as random variables and others as random processes. We combine two deterministic trajectory prediction models – the kinematics-based Generalized National Airspace Trajectory-Prediction System (GNATS), and the dynamics-based Base of Aircraft Data (BADA) – to formulate a probabilistic aircraft dynamic model which also includes model errors as additional external inputs. A computationally efficient importance sampling-based scheme is developed for this safety assessment problem involving a large number of aircraft. This approach is demonstrated using historical flight data, for aircraft operating in the Houston air traffic sector.

Safety Performance Functions to predict Separation Minima Infringements in en-route airspace

The objective of this methodology is to characterise the safety of air routes under a systematic framework, in terms of Separation Minimum Infringements (SMI) between en-route aircraft based on models known as Safety Performance Functions (SPF). Bayesian Networks have been selected as techniques with high predictive capability and low probability event estimation. Moreover, they allow the integration of knowledge modelling with data inference. It is complex to develop a Bayesian Network model for SMI prediction. It is necessary to integrate the available knowledge about the precursors of SMIs together with the accumulated knowledge from the analysis of the collected data into a conceptual framework. This framework underpinning the Bayesian Network model focuses on the Closest Point of Approach (CPA) analysis and considers the general scenario of aircraft evolution in an air traffic sector. In order to translate this conceptual framework into a set of causal sub-networks, the ATM barrier and event tree models are used.

Post Covid-19 Analysis of the Aviation Sector

Abstract: Many countries' economic prosperity and strategic development are dependent on the aviation industry, and it plays an indispensable role in the global transportation system. The emergence of a pandemic, which is likely to shatter the sector and disrupt its operations fundamentally, is one of the most common and unprecedented challenges to this industry. Beginning in 2020, the terrible impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) disease, which has evolved into a worldwide pandemic and resulted in a radical reestablishment of society's daily existence, has been faced by aviation. The pandemic has caused a shift in the formerly usual method of air travel. This thesis investigates the ramifications of COVID-19 for the aviation business, as well as the measures employed by this industry in reaction to the crisis and the intention of passengers to travel by air during pandemics. This thesis' literature analysis covers the issues that the airline sector is facing as a result of the global pandemic, as well as the restructured onboard experience, including the new safety measures that have been implemented across the entire aviation network. The report also looks at the new passenger behaviour trends. In April-May 2021, an online empirical experiment using a video advertising as a stimulus in two separate experimental circumstances was done using a quantitative research approach. The impact of aircraft safety measures on travel intention, customer happiness, value for money, and perceived health risk on the general public was investigated. According to the findings, airline safety measures are likely to have a favourable impact on expected consumer satisfaction. At the same time, direct exposure to aircraft safety measures did not lessen their perceived health risk or raise their considered value for money. According to the findings, improving customer satisfaction and expected value for money might have a favourable impact on individual travel intentions. On the contrary, the greater the perception of a health danger, the less inclined people are to fly. This would be a negative scenario for the air traffic sector, whose future development is now difficult to foresee, and the amount of time required to recover is unknown. Keywords: Covid-19, Air traffic, Analysis, Python, Pre-processing

A Hybrid Optimal Control Approach to Fuel-Efficient Aircraft Conflict Avoidance

We formulate fuel-optimal conflict-free aircraft trajectory planning as a hybrid optimal control problem. The discrete modes of the hybrid system capture the air traffic procedures for conflict resolution, e.g., speed and turn advisories. To solve problems of realistic dimensions arising from air traffic sector planning, we formulate a numerically tractable approach to solve the hybrid optimal control problem. The approach is based on introducing binary functions for each mode, relaxing the binary functions and including a penalty term on the relaxation. The transformed and discretized problem is a nonlinear program. We use the approach on a realistic case study with seven aircraft within an air traffic control sector, in which we find minimum-fuel conflict-free trajectories.

Aircraft air pollutant emissions in Greek airports

During recent years special attention has been paid to various environmental impacts from aircraft emissions. The effects become more important considering the present situation in the air traffic sector and future expectations for higher air travel demands. In this paper the evolution of aircraft air pollutant emissions in Greek airports from 1980 to 2005 is analysed. The estimation of emissions, based on the EMEP/CORINAIR methodology, takes into account all flight categories (domestic, international, scheduled, charters) and all aircraft types used in civil aviation in Greece. Emissions are estimated for Landing and Take Off (LTO) cycles. Estimations cover 38 airports used by civil aviation and show a high increase of emissions, which followed the high increase of air traffic in all Greek airports. Total flights increased by 2.4 times from 1980 to 2006. Athens airport has the higher contribution to total air traffic, as well in total emissions, but with decreasing trend (59.0% in 1980 - 42.2% in 2005). Thessaloniki and Iraklion airports follow with increasing share (6.3 - 11.7% and 6.8 - 9.8% respectively). Changes in aircraft fleet composition together with changes of each airport contribution in total civil aviation traffic influenced the increase rates of each air pollutant. NOx emissions showed higher increase rates than air traffic, while VOC and CO emissions showed lower increase rates. Average per flight emissions from 1980 to 2005 have shown increased trend for NOx, decreased trend for VOC and CO and almost stable per flight emissions for SO2 and PM2.5.

Embellishing the past: middle manager identity and informality in the implementation of new technology

This article illustrates how themes which were prominent in the industrial sociology of the 1960s and 1970s can refine our understanding of how management processes impact on the introduction of new technology and the employment relationship. Using a case study in the air traffic sector, this paper shows how middle managers’ competitive struggles and over‐reliance on worker informality can lead to omissions in the planning of technical change and the neglect of worker concerns during its implementation.

Security Abeyance: Coping with the Erosion of Job Conditions and Treatment

The construct of security abeyance is proposed to explain how general insecurity might commonly arise during organizational restructuring. Security abeyance refers to feelings of general insecurity that emerge in work settings where there is an absence of information about the meaning and intention of organizational change. The value of the abeyance construct is explored using a study of change in the air traffic sector. For security abeyance to emerge, unreadable management actions needed to be also accompanied by confusions about the worker's organizational value. In the face of an enduring frustration of meaning, initial, neutral attempts at sensemaking gave way to more proactive efforts to provoke management into clarifying workers' futures. Resolution of the abeyance predicament was found to require workers to let go of attempts to evaluate their current, personal worth to the organization and to extensively re‐evaluate their long‐term relationship with management. However, the emergence of highly distrustful worker constructions of management did not affect other, established organizational attachments. The case for developing security abeyance research is made.

A nested queue model for the analysis of air traffic control sectors

This paper deals with the interaction between the airplane traffic and the control communications traffic in an air traffic control (ATC) sector. The concept of nested queue systems is introduced, and is used to model the above air traffic situation. It is shown that under certain assumptions, some operating characteristics useful in the design and analysis of air traffic sectors can be analytically derived.