Grad student Megan Smirti in an Ames simulator.

Last fall, some 20 graduate students in “Selected Topics in Air Transportation,” a seminar co-taught by Professors Mark Hansen, Alexandre Bayen and Lecturer Jasenka Rakas journeyed across the Bay twice to NASA Ames for a hands-on tour of the Mountain View facility. The tour included a visit to “FutureFlight Central,” a two-story air traffic control and air traffic management test facility that provides a full-scale, real-time simulation of an airport. Students sat in the simulated cockpit of a jetliner as it “landed” at a virtual SFO, and gazed through “windows” (in reality, 12 projection screens) of a virtual air traffic control center at 360-degree views of an airport.

“The technology was really cool,” said grad student Megan Smirti, who is primarily interested in policy aspects of air transportation. “The neat thing about this alliance with NASA is they’re doing the cutting edge stuff that nobody else is doing.”

A Growing Relationship

The field trips, which also included presentations by NASA researchers, are just one example of the growing relationship between UC Berkeley transportation students and NASA, the nation’s leading government organization for aeronautical research. There are others.

Three ITS PhDs, Charles-Antoine Robelin, Avijit Mukherjee, and Kenny Kuhn recently were hired by NASA Ames where they are working as researchers.

Robelin, for example, works in a branch of the agency’s aviation division that deals with air traffic flow around major airports. He is also involved in research for the Next Generation Air Transportation Systems project (NGATS), which is aimed at automating portions of the nation’s air transportation system over the next 20 years.

George Meyer, a NASA scientist for more than 30 years and former Berkeley PhD student, works part time on research and has been visiting Berkeley on a weekly basis in 2006, as part of joint NASA-Berkeley projects.

NASA recently awarded substantial sums of research money to NEXTOR (the National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research), a consortium of research scientists from five universities, housed at ITS, as well  as to individual faculty members acting as principal investigators for several related research projects.

Much of the NASA funding is aimed at finding solutions to the growing air traffic congestion problem and upgrading the country’s air traffic control system. A midair collision over the Grand Canyon 50 years ago prompted the first large-scale reforms in the country’s then-fledgling air traffic control system. That system was overhauled again in 1981, but today’s air traffic controllers are struggling to keep up with existing demand in the airspace above metropolitan areas, and will be unable to handle the anticipated increase in passengers from 740 million in 2005 to a projected billion in 2015. Marion Blakey, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, recently warned that “the system will be strained beyond its limits” unless a new system is put in place soon.

Building on the Existing Partnerships

Since NEXTOR’s founding 10 years ago, its faculty and student researchers have concentrated on various aspects of the air traffic problem, such as air traffic management and control, airline operations, aviation systems planning, safety data analysis, and aviation economics. NEXTOR, which is sponsored by the FAA, works closely with the federal agency as well as public entities such as ports, airports, and departments of transportation, and private industry, such as Honeywell, Boeing, and Federal Express.

Mark Hansen, professor of civil and environmental engineering, is co-director of NEXTOR and a coordinator of NASA Ames University Affiliated Research Center (UARC), which provides funding for a wide variety of projects at universities, including Berkeley.

In 2005, Alexandre Bayen joined the faculty as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and brought with him a close relationship with NASA Ames where he worked one day a week while pursuing a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at nearby Stanford University. He also brought a background in computational control theory and an interest in the potential automation of air traffic control functionality. One of his goals is to develop mathematical algorithms for advanced collision avoidance systems for aircraft, which would have the dual effect of allowing more aircraft to use the airspace and do it more safely. He likens it to Star Wars films where streams of aircraft crisscross one another efficiently and without colliding.

“When I came to Berkeley it was very natural—and almost inevitable—to set up this connection (with NASA) again,” explained Bayen. In his laboratory, his student researchers began applying the algorithms to air traffic computer simulations developed jointly with NASA Ames.

More recently, Bayen started to work on large-scale modeling projects funded by NASA Ames, focused on modeling nationwide flows of aircraft throughout the day, in order to analyze them and optimize the overall system.

It also seemed natural for Hansen and Bayen to create a class for students to better understand the types of research that involved each of them. Ultimately, it led to the seminar, which debuted in 2006, and the field trips to NASA Ames. Hansen, with his background in transportation economics, policy and planning, and close relationship with the FAA and UARC, and Bayen, with his ties to NASA, found much overlap in their research.

“Although Mark and I work on very different topics, we use the same data,” explained Bayen. “We get a lot of that data from the FAA and from NASA. We get software from NASA, and we share these facilities.”

“There’s a huge amount of overlap,” added Hansen. “Two of the NRA’s (research grants from NASA) we received were proposed under the NEXTOR umbrella. Alex and I are also working on a UARC project, and a NASA project that came through the NRA. Those are all joint projects. Funding comes through different mechanisms but the projects are very closely interlinked.” Most of the projects, in fact, are related in some way to the larger Next Generation Air Transportation System initiative, a federal program charged with redesigning and transforming air transportation by 2025. 

The interest in aviation at ITS has grown steadily over several decades. Former ITS Director Adib Kanafani was instrumental in establishing aviation research at the institute more than 30 years ago. Ten years ago NEXTOR was established as a multi-university research center and was housed within ITS (the other participating universities are Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Maryland, Virginia Polytechnic University and George Mason University). When Bayen joined the faculty, he and Assistant Professor Raja Sengupta, an expert in unmanned aerial vehicles, helped establish the Systems Program within the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, providing expertise in aviation.

With the NASA connection, Berkeley is widening its aviation program. For students interested in aviation research, this makes Berkeley a good place to study, and a potential launching pad to jobs at NASA or private industry involved in air traffic control. As Hansen points out, the Bay Area itself has become a “hotbed of aviation research.”

NEXTOR will be hosting the annual Air Transportation Research Society’s World Conference June 21-24 in Berkeley just before the World Conference on Transportation Research, which ITS will co-host with the University of California Transportation Center.