Each year the Center for Aviation Studies funds a number of research projects through its annual
Aviation Research Seed Grant Program. The projects funded for academic year 2011-2012 include:
Indexing the Accessibility of U.S. Airports: Measurement of Direct and Indirect Service
M. O’Kelly, OSU Dept. of Geography, Principal Investigator
This project will combine various views of current US domestic air passenger traffic to produce meaningful maps and data on the air service accessibility of places. The wide range and geographical scope (400+ airports) of the data assure coverage of both large national hubs, as well as many smaller airports in peripheral locations. The idea is to use non-stop air-carrier service as an indicator to develop contrasts between levels of service (e.g. direct vs. one- and two-stop service). Such an index provides, for non-technical readers, a summary overview that can be used to illustrate key aspects of the spatial organization of the air passenger transport system.
Visit the project website at: www.geography.osu.edu/aviation
In this site, we have a large number of maps that show interesting aspects of air passenger accessibility (domestic US). In short, it portrays on a national scale, the origin based accessibility of hundreds of airports (arranged by state) from the 2011 DB1B data base. We think it is likely to be of interest to individual communities seeking to compare their situation with those of other airports. It is also a source of many useful hypotheses about the factors that underpin air passenger transport accessibility.
We would welcome comments, feedback, corrections, and suggestions for future additional feature. This is V1.0 and we have many plans for further capabilities. [Comments to: okelly.1@osu.edu]
Ground access to airports, Case Study: Columbus Area Airports
G. Akar, OSU Dept. of City and Regional Planning, Principal Investigator
This research will identify the important factors associated with ground transportation mode choice, and the potential market for alternative modes at airports in and around Columbus, Ohio, including the airports operated by the Columbus Regional Airport Authority and The Ohio State University. Throughout this project, surveys will be conducted at the Port Columbus International Airport to understand the people’s choices regarding their access modes to the airport. The surveys will include revealed and stated preference questions, presenting the individuals with different options and scenarios. The results of this research will identify the most important factors that affect the individuals’ mode choices for their airport access, and based on the findings of this research, recommendations will be drawn to achieve a more sustainable and integrated ground transportation.
State-wide estimates of the economic impact of business aviation
S. Young, OSU Dept. of Aviation, Principal Investigator
This research will review recent state aviation economic impact studies, both for their methodology and results, as well as to determine what element of these studies are directly relevant to the business aviation sector. In addition, this research will attempt to enhance these studies by performing more detailed empirical analyses as to exactly who uses the business aviation sector, how the use of business aviation fits into the overall production / supply chain, and how non-aviation related companies benefit and grow from locating near community airports. This research will serve as a foundation for research desired as part of the FAA’s NEXTOR II program, which looks to determine the impact of aviation on U.S. Productivity. This research captures a detailed analysis on a specific and important sector of aviation – business aviation.
Precision Agriculture with Remote Sensing Based on a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
James W. Gregory, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and
Scott Shearer, Ph.D. Professor and Chair Department of Food, Agricultural, and Biological Engineering
The proposed effort will develop and demonstrate a remote sensing technique for precision agriculture based on a small unmanned aerial vehicle (SUAV). It will involve collaboration between faculty in Agriculture and Aerospace Engineering, along with colleagues at Alion Science and Technology. The objective of the work is to demonstrate a functional SUAV system that is capable of providing high-resolution crop data in real time. Supporting this overall objective, a cost/benefit analysis will be conducted for the proposed SUAV solution vis-à-vis manned flights, and technology developed in this program will be transferred to the OSU flight training program.
Toward a Hierarchical Framework for the Next Generation Air Traffic Management System
Wei Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The proposed effort is based on the investigator’s previous investigations on hierarchical decentralized Air Traffic Management (ATM) system through NSF and NASA grants. While most existing approaches for ATM are based on certain centralized optimizations, the PI proposed a hierarchical decentralized flight planning framework, which can design 4D (space+time) path plans that optimize individual aircraft performance metrics while satisfying the weather and capacity constraints of the overall system. Through this seed grant, the PI plans to further improve the hierarchical framework and validate its performance against real air traffic data. Specifically, we plan to (1) design and implement a general graph based conflict resolution algorithm, (2) implement the algorithm as a sector controller in FACET (NASA’s Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool) for high-altitude sectors in the US, and (3) use this generic sector controller to perform a closed-loop simulation of our hierarchical planning framework in FACET based on real ETMS (Enhanced Traffic Management System) data of the entire US airspace. We expect that the proposed effort will lead to high impact research publications as well as realistic simulations that demonstrate the potential energy savings and delay reductions using the proposed hierarchical ATM framework.
Aligning Resilience and Safety in Business Aviation
Professor David D. Woods, Department of Integrated Systems Engineering
This project proposes to study how business aviation organizations can align their need tobe resilient in a turbulent environment with the requirements for effective proactivesafety management. The research team, under the direction of Professor David D. Woods, one of the pioneers of then new field of Resilience Engineering, will study how abusiness aviation organization adapts to handle major disrupting events (e.g., majorweather events). The study will identify how the organization manages safety while adapting their resources and schedule to handle changing client needs in anticipation of and in response to major weather events. The study will be carried out in cooperation with the safety department of a major business aviation firm. The study will utilize techniques developed at OSU to track how an organization anticipates, re-plans, and responds to events which can disrupt their normal business operations. The results will identify the key processes necessary to maintain alignment between safety and resilience. The study results will identify proactive safety management techniques tailored to the special highly dynamic environment of business aviation that support business resiliency and ultra-high safety.
Dynamic Optimization Approaches to Multi-Airport Ground Holding Problem under Uncertainty
Simge Küçükyavuz, Assistant Professor, Integrated Systems Engineering
Adverse weather conditions usually impact several airports in one or more regions in the USA for an extended time period, causing reductions in these airports’ landing capacities and delays for incoming flights. It is known that delays in airborne flights are much costlier than delays on flights on the ground. As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) implements a Ground Delay Program (GDP) to mitigate the delays caused by reductions in airport landing capacities during extreme weather events. Because the air traffic flow network is interconnected, the delays in one or more airports could propagate over the entire National Airspace System (NAS). The ground holding problem is further complicated by the uncertainties involved with the evolution of the weather conditions. In this research, the investigator proposes stochastic dynamic (multi-stage) optimization models and solution methods for the multi-airport ground holding problem under (uncertain) adverse weather conditions.
Other recent research topics have ranged from environmental sustainability to business productivity, from accessibility issues to safety and human factors issues, all contributing to improving the nation’s and world’s aviation systems. A list of the research being conducted by the CAS includes:
- Aircraft Maintenance Systems Optimization
- Airport Safety Management Systems Research
- Balancing of Land-Use Development with the Preservation of Airspace for Safer Air Navigation
- Business Aviation Services Operations Management
- Creation and Delivery of Airport Leadership Development Program
- Crew Human Factors Research
- Development and Implementation of Safety Management Systems at Commercial Service Airports
- Economic Impact of Aviation
- Environmental Impacts of Airport Expansion
- Innovative Flight Education Methods
- Simulation of the Next-Generation Air Transportation (NextGen) System
- Understanding Airspace, Objects and Their Effect on Airports
