SBIR Phase II: Information Model for Airspace Design and Planning

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to improve the efficiency of air traffic operations and increase airport and airspace capacity utilization, enabling reductions in emissions, noise impact, flight delays, and operational costs of airports and airlines. The anticipated result is to produce a software platform that will become an industry standard used by 200 major metropolitan airports and over 50 airlines globally, addressing an available market of over $100 Million. The technology may contribute to a sustainable future aviation system that enables economic growth, while minimizing environmental impact. Preliminary development and testing of the technology in New York indicates the potential to increase airport and airspace capacity by as much as 20%, with savings for delays, fuel burn, noise impact and controller workload from 10%-21%, and cost savings of $2 Billion/year. The proposed innovation may increase the understanding of airspace operations and related trade-offs by bridging the gap between aviation professionals and the public through 3D visualizations of proposed airspace changes and quantification of their expected impacts on the environment and safety. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to develop a software platform for integrated airspace and airport system planning, design, and management. Currently, airport authorities, airlines, and air navigation service providers use legacy software tools for the above. These tools are outdated and difficult to use, fail to properly quantify trade-offs between design objectives, and produce unsustainable design solutions leading to sub-optimal system performance. The research objectives of this project are to unify the disjointed functions of design, planning and performance evaluation of airport operations, quantify trade-offs between competing design objectives, and optimize for system efficiency in terms of maximizing safety and capacity while minimizing delays, emissions, noise, fuel burn and operational cost. To achieve this, the company will work with major airports and airlines to identify key requirements, develop tractable mathematical models for addressing the tasks and validate the results via application in real operational environments. The anticipated technical result is a unified software platform that will enable airports/airlines to be more efficient, while also balancing operational, societal, and environmental objectives in building a sustainable aviation system for the future. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.