ATM automation: guidance on human technology integration

© Civil Aviation Authority 2016Human interaction with technology and automation is a key area of interest to industry and safety regulators alike. In February 2014, a joint CAA/industry workshop considered perspectives on present and future implementation of advanced automated systems. The conclusion was that whilst no additional regulation was necessary, guidance material for industry and regulators was required. Development of this guidance document was completed in 2015 by a working group consisting of CAA, UK industry, academia and industry associations (see Appendix B). This enabled a collaborative approach to be taken, and for regulatory, industry, and workforce perspectives to be collectively considered and addressed. The processes used in developing this guidance included: review of the themes identified from the February 2014 CAA/industry workshop1; review of academic papers, textbooks on automation, incidents and accidents involving automation; identification of key safety issues associated with automated systems; analysis of current and emerging ATM regulatory requirements and guidance material; presentation of emerging findings for critical review at UK and European aviation safety conferences. In December 2015, a workshop of senior management from project partner organisations reviewed the findings and proposals. EASA were briefed on the project before its commencement, and Eurocontrol contributed through membership of the Working Group.Final Published versio

Recent Advances in Sustainable Winter Road Operations – A Book Proposal

Investing in winter transportation operations is essential and beneficial to the public and the economy. The U.S. economy cannot afford the cost of shutting down highways, airports, etc., during winter weather. In the northern U.S. and other cold-climate areas, winter maintenance operations are essential to ensure the safety, mobility, and productivity of transportation systems. Agencies are continually challenged to provide a high level of service and improve safety and mobility in a fiscally and environmentally responsible manner. To this end, it is desirable to use the most recent advances in the application of materials, practices, equipment, and other technologies. Such best practices are expected to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of winter operations, to optimize material usage, and to reduce associated annual spending, corrosion, and environmental impacts. Currently, no professional societies, scientific journals, or textbooks are dedicated solely to sustainable winter road operations, and key information is scattered across a variety of disciplines. The objective of the proposed book is to summarize the best practices and recent advances in sustainable winter road operations for the purposes of education and workforce development. This book is now in press and can be cited as follows: Shi, X., Fu, L. (2017). Sustainable Winter Road Operations (Eds.). ISBN: 978-1-119-18506-2. Wiley-Blackwell

High-speed civil transport study. Summary

A system of study of the potential for a high speed commercial transport aircraft addressed technology, economic, and environmental constraints. Market projections indicated a need for fleets of transport with supersonic or greater cruise speeds by the years 2000 to 2005. The associated design requirements called for a vehicle to carry 250 to 300 passengers over a range of 5000 to 6000 nautical miles. The study was initially unconstrained in terms of vehicle characteristics, such as cruise speed, propulsion systems, fuels, or structural materials. Analyses led to a focus on the most promising vehicle concepts. These were concepts that used a kerosene type fuel and cruised at Mach numbers between 2.0 to 3.2. Further systems study identified the impact of environmental constraints (for community noise, sonic boom, and engine emissions) on economic attractiveness and technological needs. Results showed that current technology cannot produce a viable high speed civil transport. Significant advances are needed to take off gross weight and allow for both economic attractiveness and environment acceptability. Specific technological requirements were identified to meet these needs

Ono: an open platform for social robotics

In recent times, the focal point of research in robotics has shifted from industrial ro- bots toward robots that interact with humans in an intuitive and safe manner. This evolution has resulted in the subfield of social robotics, which pertains to robots that function in a human environment and that can communicate with humans in an int- uitive way, e.g. with facial expressions. Social robots have the potential to impact many different aspects of our lives, but one particularly promising application is the use of robots in therapy, such as the treatment of children with autism. Unfortunately, many of the existing social robots are neither suited for practical use in therapy nor for large scale studies, mainly because they are expensive, one-of-a-kind robots that are hard to modify to suit a specific need. We created Ono, a social robotics platform, to tackle these issues. Ono is composed entirely from off-the-shelf components and cheap materials, and can be built at a local FabLab at the fraction of the cost of other robots. Ono is also entirely open source and the modular design further encourages modification and reuse of parts of the platform

Improving Inter-service bandwidth fairness in Wireless Mesh Networks

Includes bibliographical references.We are currently experiencing many technological advances and as a result, a lot of applications and services are developed for use in homes, offices and out in the field. In order to attract users and customers, most applications and / or services are loaded with graphics, pictures and movie clips. This unfortunately means most of these next generation services put a lot of strain on networking resources, namely bandwidth. Efficient management of bandwidth in next generation wireless network is therefore important for ensuring fairness in bandwidth allocation amongst multiple services with diverse quality of service needs. A number of algorithms have been proposed for fairness in bandwidth allocation in wireless networks, and some researchers have used game theory to model the different aspects of fairness. However, most of the existing algorithms only ensure fairness for individual requests and disregard fairness among the classes of services while some other algorithms ensure fairness for the classes of services and disregard fairness among individual requests

Rethinking the Internet of Things: A Scalable Approach to Connecting Everything

Apress is proud to announce that Rethinking the Internet of Things was a 2014 Jolt Award Finalist, the highest honor for a programming book. And the amazing part is that there is no code in the book. Over the next decade, most devices connected to the Internet will not be used by people in the familiar way that personal computers, tablets and smart phones are. Billions of interconnected devices will be monitoring the environment, transportation systems, factories, farms, forests, utilities, soil and weather conditions, oceans and resources. Many of these sensors and actuators will be networked into autonomous sets, with much of the information being exchanged machine-to-machine directly and without human involvement. Machine-to-machine communications are typically terse. Most sensors and actuators will report or act upon small pieces of information - "chirps". Burdening these devices with current network protocol stacks is inefficient, unnecessary and unduly increases their cost of ownership. This must change. The architecture of the Internet of Things must evolve now by incorporating simpler protocols toward at the edges of the network, or remain forever inefficient. Rethinking the Internet of Things describes reasons why we must rethink current approaches to the Internet of Things. Appropriate architectures that will coexist with existing networking protocols are described in detail. An architecture comprised of integrator functions, propagator nodes, and end devices, along with their interactions, is explored