Air traffic control using Virtual Stationary Automata

As air travel has become an essential part of modern life, the air traffic control system has become strained and overworked. This problem is occurring because the capacity of the current air traffic control system is severely limited by the capabilities of its human operators. Therefore, if we are to increase the capacity of the air traffic control system, then we must develop new automated systems for air traffic control. In my thesis, I take a distributed approach to automated air traffic control. I use a wireless ad-hoc network to simulate a layer of Virtual Stationary Automata, or VSAs, which are virtual machines located at fixed locations in space. These VSAs can then be used to help coordinate the aircraft in the air traffic control system. I model the air traffic control system as a directed graph, showing how the continuous real world air traffic can be abstracted into a discrete graph representation. Using this graph representation, I provide two algorithms to perform safe and efficient air traffic control and prove their effectiveness.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Brown, Matthew D., M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nancy Lynch.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41245

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/41245