Future growth of air traffic demands reduced transit times, increased throughput capacity and improved safety at airports. Essential to this is the need for more efficient routing of taxiing aircraft. The routing function has been identified by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) as an opening for future autonomous operation. Developments in aircraft functions and capabilities to enable automous routing rely on an understanding of the future system requirements.

This project is investigating the use of autonomous operation to achieve faster air-to-gate-to-air transit at airports. Uncertainty will be included in an iterative mixed integer linear programming approach and scalable solutions will be determined through the development of distributed solution methods. The requirements for the communication network infrastructure and computation and sensing on board each aircraft will be identified.

Project staff and support

Gillian Clare (Postgraduate Associate, University of Bristol)
Arthur Richards (Academic supervisor, University of Bristol)
Sanjiv Sharma (Industrial supervisor, Airbus)
Melvin Brown (Technology Translator, Industrial Mathematics KTN)

This project is being carried out at the University of Bristol, in conjunction with Airbus. It is supported by an EPSRC industrial CASE award, made available through the Knowledge Transfer Network for Industrial Mathematics. Start date: October 2006; duration: 3.5 years.