The National Air Transportation System as a Reconfigurable Engineered System

The smooth and reliable functioning of the National Air Transportation System (NATS) is vital to the nation's economy. NATS generates about $150 billion in revenue and transports more than 700 million people annually. Yet, disturbance-induced delays-typically problems caused by weather-cost the industry and consumers more than $10 billion each year. The goal of this research is to work toward the autonomous reconfigurability of NATS, so that the system can respond to any disturbance. Researchers will model NATS as a distributed multiagent control problem, and consider the autonomous reconfigurability of NATS through the development of theory and algorithms for dynamic and distributed robust optimization models on multiple scales and granularities. Our goal is to investigate, (1) how local interventions can be made to work autonomously, robustly and synergistically; (2) what operating environments, pricing and other incentives might bring about such a paradigm shift in NATS; and (3) what the potential national benefits from such an integrated approach might be in terms of reduced delays to flights and passengers, more schedule reliability, and lower operating costs.