Sustainable and data-driven airport operations: Optimisation models and machine learning approaches

The aerospace industry annually provides transport for billions of passengers along trillions of kilometers. The industry is continuously aiming to provide these services in a more efficient and sustainable way. One possibility is to consider improving airside airport operations, both current types and those expected in the near future....

Conflict Resolution at High Traffic Densities with Reinforcement Learning

Increasing delays and congestion reported in many aviation sectors indicate that the current centralised operational model is rapidly approaching saturation levels. Air Traffic Control (ATC) system is not expected to keep pace with the ever-increasing demand for air transportation. Its capacity is still limited by the available controllers, and...

Hover and fast flight of minimum-mass mission-capable flying robots

Highly automated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or "flying robots" are rapidly becoming an important asset to society. The last decade has seen the advent of an impressive number of new UAV types and applications. For many applications, the UAVs need to be safe, highly automated, and versatile. Safety is a prerequisite to allowing their use in...

Radar Sensing in General Aviation: For Purposes of Detect and Avoid

Safety is crucial in aviation. This includes the category of General Aviation, which consists of flights that are not performed by commercial airliners. Many of these vehicles are small in comparison to the aircraft used for commercial transport, providing seats for two or four persons. Despite their limited size, accidents involving General...

Urban airspace design for autonomous drone delivery

The paradigm of large-scale adoption of autonomous drone delivery promises to provide commercial and societal benefits. Over the past years, several companies have investigated the use-case of drones to transport small express packages of fast-food meals and time-sensitive medical supplies. The latter has shown to be highly beneficial in many...

Air Traffic Control Advisory System for the Prevention of Bird Strikes

Bird strike prevention in civil aviation has traditionally focused on the airport perimeter. Since the risk of especially damaging bird strikes outside the airport boundaries is rising, this PhD thesis researches the safety potential of operational bird strike prevention involving pilots and controllers. In such a concept, controllers would be...

Systematic Design Methodology for Prognostic and Health Management Systems to Support Aircraft Predictive Maintenance

With the rapid development in the past century, the air transport network has become one of the most important infrastructure networks for both the domestic and global economy. Within an airline, the maintenance area is responsible for planning and executing all preventive actions required to meet safety standards including maintenance tasks,...

Open Aircraft Performance Modeling: Based on an Analysis of Aircraft Surveillance Data

A large number of stakeholders exist in the modern air traffic management ecosystem. Air transportation studies benefit from collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and findings between these different players. However, not all parties have equal access to information. Due to the lack of open-source tools and models, it is not always possible...

Analyzing and Modeling Capacity for Decentralized Air Traffic Control

The current system of Air Traffic Control (ATC) relies on a centralized control architecture. At its core, this system is heavily dependent on manual intervention by human Air Traffic Controllers (ATCos) to ensure safe operations. The capacity of this system is, therefore, closely tied to the maximum workload that can be tolerated by ATCos....

Incremental Control of Hybrid Micro Air Vehicles

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) can perform many useful tasks, such as mapping and delivery. For these tasks either rotorcraft are used, which can hover but are not very efficient, or fixed wing vehicles, which are efficient but can not hover. Hybrid MAVs combine the hovering of a rotorcraft with the efficiency of a fixed wing. The reason that these...

Autonomous Conflict Detection and Resolution for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: On integration into the Airspace System

In the last decade, the commercial values of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), defined as devices that are capable of sustainable flights in the atmosphere that do not require to have a human (pilot) on-board, become widely recognized thanks to the advancement of technology in materials, sensors, computation, and telemetry. As UAVs are becoming...