The notion of air traffic complexity has many facets and can be related to workload, which is a perception of a given situation by a human controller or to disorder, which is intrinsic. The present work falls within the second category and aims at computing the level of organization in a neighborhood of a point on the earth. It is based on a two steps approach: in the first one, a smooth time-dependent vector field is inferred from the sampled traffic using local linear models. Since positions are measured on a sphere, some special care must be taken as it is not a vector space. Using the Levi-Civita connection and its associated parallel transport, a local linear model...

Air transportation traffic is progressively increasing over the years and dealing with it is an essential task to guarantee fluid flights in the future. Several works already indexed multiple aspects of aviation, among them, the E-MAN system. It introduced the sequencing of arriving traffic, starting from early stages of the En-route phase. This change facilitated the work for the approach controllers but also increased the workload of the En-route controllers. To handle that workload, controllers are now assisted by tools that consider the new constraints introduced by the arrival management system and propose advisories. From that same perspective, our project focuses...

The paper considers the rather unexplored problem of designing a network that can be associated with an urban airspace so that Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) based logistics can be performed efficiently. This problem is important to guarantee mobility and accessibility for all operators. First, a structure for the lower layers of the urban airspace is proposed, then an optimal network design problem is formulated, and a heuristic solution approach is developed. The paper is related to the subjects of the Smart Cities and the Smart Mobility of the SMART2021 Conference.

Last mile delivery is defined as the movement of goods to/from a transportation hub from/to final delivery destinations, this part of the logistics chain being in general for many fields of logistics the more problematic and costly. Latest technologies are providing new means for collecting and exchanging information as well as for delivering logistics services. For example, advanced drone technology can produce today logistics solutions considering that UAVs can now provide acceptable payloads, autonomy and collision avoidance capabilities. This technology appears to be an opportunity to reduce the last mile logistics costs as well as to contribute to sustainability...

Drones have become fixtures in commerce, safety efforts, and in homes as a leisure activity. Researchers have started to explore how drones can support people with disabilities in piloting and serve as assistive devices. Our work focuses on people with vision impairment and investigates what motivates them to fly drones. We administered a survey to visually impaired adults that gauged general interest in drone piloting and previous experience with drones. From the 59 survey responses, we interviewed 13 participants to elaborate on how they envision using drones and how different feedback and modes of piloting can make the flying experience more accessible. We found that...

Piloting an aircraft is a difficult task that requires high-level cognitive abilities. Few studies have investigated the use of cognitive assistants to support pilots. This study is a first step toward an in-flight assistant for light aircraft pilots. We applied a user-centered approach to develop BLEXVFR, a mobile application that enables pilots to access information and program alerts. A pilot study in a simulator with four pilots showed that the user experience of BLEXVFR was at least comparable to existing applications. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → HCI design and evaluation methods; Interactive systems and tools; Touch screens.

This paper presents an adapted trust-region method for computationally expensive black-box optimization problems with mixed binary variables that involve a cyclic symmetry property. Mixed binary problems occur in several practical optimal design problems, e.g., aircraft engine turbines, mooring lines of offshore wind turbines, electric engine stators and rotors. The motivating application for this study is the optimal design of helicopter bladed disk turbo-machines. The necklace concept is introduced to deal with the cyclic symmetry property, and to avoid costly black-box objective function evaluations at equivalent solutions. An adapted distance is proposed for the...

As drones become more and more frequent in industry and perhaps tomorrow in everyday life, the variety and sensitivity of their missions will increase. Securing the communication taking place with the drones and especially in the network of a swarm, is of primary importance to allow a safe integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles into air traffic. Drones are subject to a range of attacks, from GPS jamming to application bug exploits. Among these attacks, and irrespective to whether they have already been implemented or not, communication is one of the main contributors, both as a vector and as a target. In this article, we use previous work on security threats concerning...

In this paper, we propose a new piecewise polynomial model (PwPM) for the modelling of an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) aerodynamic coefficients over a wide flight envelope, where they are characterized by nonlinear and hysteresis phenomena. An associated identification method using Constrained Least Squares (CLS) is then presented and successfully applied to experimental data obtained from wind tunnel measurements. The resulting fitting is finally compared with the similar piecewise models PWPFIT and AERODAS, showing a greater precision in its modelling, while maintaining their relative simplicity and computation performance.