Passenger-Centric Metrics for Air Transportation Leveraging Mobile Phone and Twitter Data

International audienceThis paper aims at presenting a detailed analysis of domestic air passengers behavior during a major air-traffic disturbance, from two complementary passenger-centric perspective: a passenger mobility perspective and a passenger social media perspective. By leveraging over 5 billion records of mobile phone location data per day from a major carrier in the United States, passenger mobility can be reliably analyzed, no matter which airline the passengers fly on or which airport they fly to and from. Such information is currently unavailable to the major aviation stakeholders at such scale and can be used to establish performance benchmarks from a passenger's perspective. Combining it with a Twitter analysis provides a more detailed and passenger-focused analysis than the traditional flight-centric measurements used to evaluate the overall system performance. More generally, these two passenger-centric analysis could be implemented in real-time for a daily evaluation of the Air Transportation System, enabling a faster analysis of the impact of major disruptions, whether due to meteorological conditions or system failures

Trajectory APproach AnalysiS: A Post-operational Aircraft Approach Analysis Tool

International audienceIn aviation, safety has always been a key issue to reduce the number of incidents and accidents. Nowadays, it is even more important since the air traffic increases every year, and is predicted to reach 7.8 billion passengers worldwide in 2036. Flight safety offices aim at enhancing safety, analyzing past events, and preventing potential critical occurrences. This paper presents TAPAS, a post-operational aircraft approach analysis tool. The software offers an interactive analysis of aircraft approach energy management. The software uses and validates an existing atypical approach detection algorithm on flight data record and flight safety office events from airlines. Various correlations and analysis are conducted to illustrate the potential benefits of this methodology

Multi‐agent Systems for Air Traffic Conflicts Resolution by Local Speed Regulation

Best Paper Award for Automation trackInternational audienceAir Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) aims at structuring traffic in order to reduce congestion in airspace. Congestion being linked to aircraft located at the same position at the same time, ATFM organizes traffic in the spatial dimension (e.g. route network) and/or in the time dimension (sequencing and merging in TMA, Miles-in-Trail for en-route airspace).The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology that allows the traffic to self-organize in the time dimension when demand is high. This structure disappears when the demand diminishes.In order to reach this goal, a multi-agent system has been developed. This algorithm regulates aircraft speed in order to reduce the number of conflicts, thus decreases overall traffic complexity, which becomes easier to manage by air traffic controllers. This algorithm was applied on realistic examples

Planification coopérative de trajectoires d’avions

National audienceLe trafic aérien est actuellement régulé par les contrôleurs, qui en assurent la fluidité. Dans le contexte actuel de croissance constante du trafic aérien, il est prévu que ces capacités de régulation arrivent à saturation. Certains travaux de recherche actuels dans ce domaine visent à réduire la charge de travail des contrôleurs aériens en automatisant certaines tâches de décisions. Grâce à l’ADS 1, les avions peuvent communiquer la trajectoire qu’ils prévoient d’emprunter (et ses éventuelles modifications) durant toute la durée du vol. En recevant ces informations, émises par leurs voisins, ils connaissent l’état local du trafic. L’ADS ouvre donc la porte au développement de méthodes permettant aux avions d’adapter leurs trajectoires pour respecter les distances de sécurité, tâche jusque-là dévolue aux seuls contrôleurs aériens.La plupart des méthodes développées pour automatiser la gestion du trafic sont centralisées, et cherchent à optimiser le trafic dans son ensemble. Or, celles-ci s’adaptent difficilement à des évènements imprévus (résilience aux perturbations). L’approche décentralisée offre plusieurs avantages, notamment la répartition des calculs et des décisions entre les entités composant le système, et une meilleure résilience. Nous avons utilisé cette dernière approche en développant un système multi-agents pour réguler le trafic aérien

Système multi-agents pour la structuration du trafic aérien

National audienceLe trafic aérien est actuellement régulé par les contrôleurs, qui en assurent la fluidité. Dans le contexte actuel de croissance constante du trafic aérien, il est prévu que ces capacités de régulation arrivent à saturation. Certains travaux de recherche actuels dans ce domaine visent à réduire la charge de travail des contrôleurs aériens en automatisant certaines tâches de décisions.La plupart des méthodes développées pour automatiser la gestion du trafic sont centralisées, et cherchent à optimiser le trafic dans son ensemble. Or, celles-ci s'adaptent difficilement à des évènements imprévus. L'approche décentralisée offre plusieurs avantages, dont une meilleure résilience aux perturbations, ainsi que la répartition des calculs et des décisions entre les entités composant le système. Nous avons utilisé cette dernière approche et nous avons développé un système multi-agents pour réguler le trafic aérien.La première phase des travaux a porté sur le maintien des normes de séparation entre aéronefs par l'application de faibles changements de vitesse par les avions. La deuxième phase a été consacrée à l'élaboration d'une méthode permettant d'adapter le réseau de routes aériennes en fonction de la complexité du trafic

Passengers on social media: A real-time estimator of the state of the US air transportation system

International audienceThis paper aims at investigating further the use of the social media Twitter as a real-time estimator of the US Air Transportation system. Two different machine learning regressors have been trained on this 2017 passenger-centric dataset and tested on the first two months of 2018 for the estimation of air traffic delays at departure and arrival at 34 different US airports. Using three different levels of content-related features created from the flow of social media posts led to the extraction of useful information about the current state of the air traffic system. The resulting methods yield higher estimation performances than traditional state-of-the-art and off-the-shelf time-series forecasting techniques performed on flight-centric data for more than 28 airports. Moreover the features extracted can also be used to start a passenger-centric analysis of the Air Transportation system. This paper is the continuation of previous works focusing on estimating air traffic delays leveraging a real-time publicly available passenger-centered data source. The results of this study suggest a method to use passenger-centric data-sources as an estimator of the current state of the different actors of the air transportation system in real-time

Door-to-door Travel Time Analysis from Paris to London and Amsterdam using Uber Data

International audienceSESAR Flightpath 2050 sets some ambitious goals for air travel, specifically regarding door-to-door travel times. Using Uber data, a reliable estimation of door-to-door travel times is possible which then enables a comparison of different travel modes such as rail and air. This model of the full door-to-door travel time for multi modal trips can also be used to evaluate where Europe stands with respect to SESAR's goals and how they should try to address the related difficulties

Interval Observers for Secure Estimation in Cyber-Physical Systems

International audienceStealthy attacks on the sensors and actuators embedded in cyber-physical systems could hinder the safe operation of these systems if the state estimators monitoring them cannot detect such attacks in time. In this paper, we study stealthy attacks in the framework of interval observers. We consider two classes of attacks: when a malicious agent compromises the sensors and when it is able to alter the system's actuators. For each type of attack, we design a dedicated interval observer for the system's state and we construct bounds for the attack signal. We investigate the ability of such interval observer to provide accurate estimates when the system is under the attack. Numerical simulations for a lateral model of an aircraft illustrate the capabilities of the synthesized observers

Data visualization techniques for airspace flow modeling

International audienceWith the predicted growth of air traffic, traffic flow managers need new tools to access information to support their decision making processes. Recent progress with information visualization tools enables users to explore large data sets and extract decisive knowledge. Their advantages for air traffic applications are presented in this paper. They can provide high level information to aggregate trajectories. With constant feedback due to human perception, a flow model of the airspace, reflecting its intrinsic structure, is elaborated and can be used for further research