Friday 27th October 2018 the official kick-off event unfolded at Inholland University of Applied Sciences in Delft. Participants from numerous companies and research establishments congregated to make new acquaintances and share their ideas. The dean of Inholland Delft, Gerard van Oosten, gave a welcoming speech. Next lector Robotica Cock Heemskerk formally introduced the unique HiPerGreen project. Several guest speakers presented additional subject related information: Jeremy Harbinson (distinguished researcher in plant physiology atm Wageningen UR), David Pajares (AvioniCS – a company specialised in rapid prototyping and control systems for small UAVs) and Arash Noroozi (ElpaNav, a start-up company for localisation technology). Lucien Fesselet, assistant project manager, resumed the day with a brief history of the ‘Drones in de kas’ project where HiPerGreen evolved from. Then the audience were split into smaller groups to assess the risks associated within each project work package. A important outcome was the consensus that the business case validation should be started right from the beginning. The kick-off was concluded with a drink.
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For long flights, the cruise is the longest phase and where the largest amount of fuel is consumed. An in-cruise optimization method has been implemented to calculate the optimal trajectory that reduces the flight cost. A three-dimensional grid has been created, coupling lateral navigation and vertical navigation profiles. With a dynamic analysis of the wind, the aircraft can perform a horizontal deviation or change altitudes via step climbs to reduce fuel consumption. As the number of waypoints and possible step climbs is increased, the number of flight trajectories increases exponentially; thus, a genetic algorithm has been implemented to reduce the total number of calculated trajectories compared to an exhaustive search. The aircraft’s model has been obtained from a performance database, which is currently used in the commercial flight management system studied in this paper. A 5% average flight cost reduction has been obtained.
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The design and mission requirements of aero vehicles, which vary on a day-to-day basis, have become major study concerns in the burgeoning aviation sector. In addition to the design and mission criteria that must be met in an aero vehicle design, the designers' primary goals are to construct original, innovative, environmentally friendly, fuel-efficient, and sustainable designs. In this study, a detailed conceptual design of a helicopter that does not need a notable runway for operation and is limited by mission and design requirements is offered. Within the scope of this research, a competitor analysis study was undertaken in accordance with the defined criteria, and design approaches were chosen based on the outcomes of competitor analysis. In addition, this research, which looks for an environmentally friendly and sustainable design, was developed with the aviation industry's demands in mind by analyzing the International Helicopter Safety Team's (IHST) data. As a result of the reports analyzed and considering the causes and consequences of accidents that have happened, the objective of the design research was to achieve a sustainable, ecologically friendly, and fuel-efficient design by reducing the number of accidents and damage. The planning and design processes as a result of this examination are essential as a step towards the helicopter being an original design and in the context of solution methodologies. This archetypal design aims to shed light on helicopter design studies and serve as a roadmap for future research.
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The constant growth of air traffic, especially in Europe, is putting pressure on airports, which, in turn, are suffering congestion problems. The airspace surrounding airport, terminal manoeuvring area (TMA), is particularly congested, since it accommodates all the converging traffic to and from airports. Besides airspace, airport ground capacity is also facing congestion problems, as the inefficiencies coming from airspace operations are transferred to airport ground and vice versa. The main consequences of congestion at airport airspace and ground, is given by the amount of delay generated, which is, in turn, transferred to other airports within the network. Congestion problems affect also the workload of air traffic controllers that need to handle this big amount of traffic.This thesis deals with the optimization of the integrated airport operations, considering the airport from a holistic point of view, by including operations such as airspace and ground together. Unlike other studies in this field of research, this thesis contributes by supporting the decisions of air traffic controllers regarding aircraft sequencing and by mitigating congestion on the airport ground area. The airport ground operations and airspace operations can be tackled with two different levels of abstractions, macroscopic or microscopic, based on the time-frame for decision-making purposes. In this thesis, the airport operations are modeled at a macroscopic level.The problem is formulated as an optimization model by identifying an objective function that considers the amount of conflicts in the airspace and capacity overload on the airport ground; constraints given by regulations on separation minima between consecutive aircraft in the airspace and on the runway; decision variables related to aircraft entry time and entry speed in the airspace, landing runway and departing runway choice and pushback time. The optimization model is solved by implementing a sliding window approach and an adapted version of the metaheuristic simulated annealing. Uncertainty is included in the operations by developing a simulation model and by including stochastic variables that represent the most significant sources of uncertainty when considering operations at a macroscopic level, such as deviation from the entry time in the airspace, deviation in the average taxi time and deviation in the pushback time. In this thesis, optimization and simulation techniques are combined together by developing two methods that aim at improving the solution robustness and feasibility. The first method acts as a validation tool for the optimized solution, and it improves the robustness of solution by iteratively fine-tuning some of the optimization model input parameters. The second method embeds the optimization in a simulation environment by taking full advantage of the sliding window approach and creating a loop for a continuous improvement of the optimized solution at each window of the sliding window approach. Both methods prove to be effective by improving the performance, lowering the total amount of conflicts up to 23.33% for the first method and up to 11.2% for the second method, however, in contrast to the deterministic method, the two methods they are not able to achieve a conflict-free scenario due to the effect of uncertainty.In general, the research conducted in this thesis highlights that uncertainty is a factor that affects to a large extent the feasibility of optimized solution when applied to real-world instances, and it, moreover, confirms that using simulation together with optimization has the potentiality toivdeal with uncertainty. The framework developed can be potentially applied to similar problems and different optimization solving methods can be adapted to it.Keywords: Optimization, Simulation, Integrated airport operations, Uncertainty
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Airport management is frequently faced with a problem of assigning flights to available stands and parking positions in the most economical way that would comply with airline policies and suffer minimum changes due to any operational disruptions. This work presents a novel approach to the most common airport problem – efficient stand assignment. The described algorithm combines benefits of data-mining and metaheuristic approaches and generates qualitative solutions, aware of delay trends and airport performance perturbations. The presented work provides promising solutions from the starting moments of computation, in addition, it delivers to the airport stakeholders delay-aware stand assignment, and facilitates the estimation of risk and consequences of any operational disruptions on the slot adherence.
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In this work, the concept of an Artificial Intelligence-based (AI) Digital Twin (DT) of an aircraft system is introduced, with the goal to improve the corresponding MRO Operations. More specifically, the current study aims to obtaining knowledge on the optimal placement of sensors in an ideal Power Electronics Cooling System (PECS) of a modern airliner, aiming to improve input data as a basis for an AI-based DT. The three main fluid parameters to be measured directly or indirectly at various physical locations at the PECS are mass flow rate, temperature and static pressure. The physics-based model can then be combined with a Machine Learning (ML) model, such as a Random Forest (RF), with a multitude of decision trees. Following, the AI system determines whether the PECS operations is considered normal, aiming to optimize the performance of the system and to maximize the Useful Remaining Life (URL). The suggested AI-DT approach is based both on data-driven and physics-based models, an approach which results in increased reliability and availability, reducing possible Aircraft on Ground (AOG) events. Subsequently, the enhanced prediction capability results in the optimization of the maintenance processes and in reduced operational costs.
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