Seminars

Abstract: Urban air mobility (UAM) is the term that is increasingly being used to describe an envisioned world where vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) aircraft transport passengers and cargo within an urban environment. To achieve this vision, we must address the following challenges that were identified during the 2018 House Science Committee Hearing on UAM: (1) aircraft will require greater autonomy; (2) air traffic management (ATM), i.e., air traffic control (ATC) and traffic flow management (TFM) will require greater autonomy; (3) the proliferation of vertiports will raise noise, privacy, and safety concerns; (4) vertiport locations and flight trajectories must be jointly optimized for efficiency, noise, privacy, and safety; and (5) new certification standards will be required for vehicles, systems, and operators.

Using my prior work as a foundation, I will present a multidisciplinary research agenda to address the aforementioned challenges. Specifically, in addition to outlining the scope of the agenda and identifying key research problems, I will speak in detail about the development of use of: (1) algorithms for aircraft trajectory prediction and optimization in combination with stochastic models and optimization algorithms to jointly optimize landing and takeoff trajectories, vertiport locations, and flight schedules; (2) fuel-optimal conflict-resolution algorithms to manage hundreds of unmanned aerial vehicles in high-density airspace; (3) algorithms for optimal drone re-supply of delivery trucks thereby enabling same-day or perhaps even less-than-two-hour delivery of virtually any item; and (4) a framework for combining the principles and methodologies of law, policy and engineering in a holistic way to address certification, privacy, and public acceptance issues. I will also discuss how the proposed research agenda is extensible to regional, national, and global mobility challenges.

Bio: Dr. John-Paul Clarke is Vice President of Strategic Technologies at United Technologies Corporation, as well as a College of Engineering Dean’s Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2005, he was a faculty member at MIT, a visiting researcher at the Boeing Company, and a member of the technical staff at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. He is co-founder of four companies including most recently a startup that applies low-frequency statistical modeling to the prediction of hotel demand, and model reference adaptive control to the setting of hotel prices.

Dr. Clarke is a leading expert in aircraft trajectory prediction and optimization, especially as it pertains to the development of flight procedures that reduce the environmental impact of aviation, as well as the development and use of stochastic models and optimization algorithms to improve the efficiency and robustness of airline, airport, and air traffic operations. Over the years, he has chaired or served on advisory and technical committees chartered by the AIAA, EU, FAA, ICAO, NASA, the National Academies, the US Army, and the US DOT. Most notably, he was co-chair of the National Academies Committee that developed the US National Agenda for Autonomy Research related to Civil Aviation.

Dr. Clarke received the S.B., S.M., and Sc.D. degrees from MIT in 1991, 1992, and 1997, respectively. His many prior honors include the 1999 AIAA/AAAE/ACC Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award, the 2003 FAA Excellence in Aviation Award, the 2006 National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lectureship, and the 2012 AIAA/SAE William Littlewood Lectureship. He is a Fellow of the AIAA, and is a member of AGIFORS, INFORMS, and Sigma Xi.