Optimal aircraft rerouting during space launches
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Commercial interest in space exploration and capabilities has seen steady growth. This growth has the potential to advance science, inspire innovation, introduce space tourism, and address global concerns such geospatial monitoring and data access, universal data communications, and weather. One challenge facing space exploration is how to expand operations while minimizing the disruption to shared resources like airspace. Currently, during a space launch or reentry, the Federal Aviation Administration prohibits air traffic within a large column of airspace around the launch trajectory. The prohibited airspace is often active for hours at a time, resulting in the rerouting of hundreds of flights at the cost of thousands of dollars to airlines per launch. If the current launch and reentry procedures do not change, they could limit technology advancement and space exploration or hurt airlines. A new method of managing the airspace during space launches would need to maintain safety, maximize efficiency, and not increase air traffic controller workload. To address safety and efficiency, recent research has focused on leveraging new technology to make the prohibited airspace dynamic throughout the space launch and to limit the geographical extent. To do this successfully, the approach must accurately model the airspace, including both the aircraft and the dispersion of debris in case of an anomaly, and must capture the inherent uncertainty of launch anomalies to provide encompassing rerouting regions. This thesis uses Markov decision processes to model the problem of aircraft rerouting during space launches and dynamic programming to solve for optimal rerouting policies. The resulting policies are run through simulated scenarios to measure their effects on safety and efficiency. The results produce smaller prohibited regions and provide real-time reroutes for air traffic controllers to relay to pilots during a space launch. These outputs can be used as the foundation for a decision support tool that assists air traffic controllers in rerouting flights during space launches.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Tompa, Rachael Elizabeth |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Kochenderfer, Mykel J, 1980- |
| Thesis advisor | Kochenderfer, Mykel J, 1980- |
| Thesis advisor | Alonso, Juan José, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Erzberger, Heinz |
| Thesis advisor | Manchester, Zachary |
| Degree committee member | Alonso, Juan José, 1968- |
| Degree committee member | Erzberger, Heinz |
| Degree committee member | Manchester, Zachary |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rachael Elizabeth Tompa. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Rachael Elizabeth Tompa
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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