Airspace and air traffic management in the age of uncrewed aerial systems

The air transportation system continues to expand and evolve. While growth in legacy air traffic necessitates improvements to existing infrastructure, potential new entrants such as small drones and larger aerial mobility vehicles (“flying cars” or “air taxis”) call for new frameworks in airspace and air traffic management entirely. This is driven by three factors: Physics (these new entrants fly differently, and are impacted by external conditions such as wind differently), scale (these new entrants are projected to operate at numbers magnitudes above current air traffic volumes), and complexity (these new entrants are projected to operate in far more challenging settings, such as low altitude environments in an urban city). In this talk, I will discuss recent projects related to weather-dependent service reliability of drone package deliver operations, UAS operations optimisation for hazardous environment navigation, as well as airspace congestion management for larger, air taxi-type vehicles.

Related papers/articles:

Max is an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also has courtesy appointments in Civil and Environmental Engineering as well as Industrial and Operations Engineering. Max received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021. He received his MSE in Systems Engineering and BSE in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, both from the University of Pennsylvania, in 2018. Max’s research and teaching interests include air transportation systems, airport and airline operations, Advanced Air Mobility, networked systems, as well as optimization and control.

For more information about the ESD Seminar, please email esd_invite@sutd.edu.sg