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1. Control and Optimization of Air Traffic Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-control-070720-080844  

   Gopalakrishnan, Karthik; Balakrishnan, Hamsa (May 2021, Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems)

   The air transportation system connects the world through the transport of goods and people. However, operational inefficiencies such as flight delays and cancellations are prevalent, resulting in economic and environmental impacts. In the first part of this article, we review recent advances in using network analysis techniques to model the interdependencies observed in the air transportation system and to understand the role of airports in connecting populations, serving air traffic demand, and spreading delays. In the second part, we present some of our recent work on using operational data to build dynamical system models of air traffic delay networks. We show that Markov jump linear system models capture many of the salient characteristics of these networked systems. We illustrate how these models can be validated and then used to analyze system properties such as stability and to design optimal control strategies that limit the propagation of disruptions in air traffic networks. 

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2. CYBER-PHYSICAL SECURITY OF AIR TRAFFIC SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS

   Thudimilla, Anusha; McMillin, Bruce (March 2020, Critical Infrastructure Protection XIV)

   Cyber-physical system security is a significant concern in the critical infrastructure. Strong interdependencies between cyber and physical components render cyber-physical systems highly susceptible to integrity attacks such as injecting malicious data and projecting fake sensor measurements. Traditional security models partition cyber-physical systems into just two domains – high and low. This absolute partitioning is not well suited to cyber-physical systems because they comprise multiple overlapping partitions. Information flow properties, which model how inputs to a system affect its outputs across security partitions, are important considerations in cyber-physical systems. Information flows support traceability analysis that helps detect vulnerabilities and anomalous sources, contributing to the implementation of mitigation measures. This chapter describes an automated model with graph-based information flow traversal for identifying information flow paths in the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system used in civilian aviation, and subsequently partitioning the flows into security domains. The results help identify ADS-B system vulnerabilities to failures and attacks, and determine potential mitigation measures. 

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3. A Fixed Air Corridor Model for UAS Traffic Management in Urban Areas

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TAES.2024.3396788  

   Asslouj, Aeris El; Uppaluru, Harshvardhan; Ramezani, Mohamadreza; Atkins, Ella; Rastgoftar, Hossein (January 2024, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems)
4. SkyTrakx: A Toolkit for Simulation and Verification of Unmanned Air-Traffic Management Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ITSC48978.2021.9564492  

   Hsieh, Chiao; Sibai, Hussein; Taylor, Hebron; Ni, Yifeng; Mitra, Sayan (September 2021, EEE International Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC))

   The key concept for safe and efficient traffic management for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) is the notion of operation volume (OV). An OV is a 4-dimensional block of airspace and time, which can express an aircraft’s intent, and can be used for planning, de-confliction, and traffic management. While there are several high-level simulators for UAS Traffic Management (UTM), we are lacking a frame- work for creating, manipulating, and reasoning about OVs for heterogeneous air vehicles. In this paper, we address this and present SkyTrakx—a software toolkit for simulation and verification of UTM scenarios based on OVs. First, we illustrate a use case of SkyTrakx by presenting a specific air traffic coordination protocol. This protocol communicates OVs between participating aircraft and an airspace manager for traffic routing. We show how existing formal verification tools, Dafny and Dione, can assist in automatically checking key properties of the protocol. Second, we show how the OVs can be computed for heterogeneous air vehicles like quadcopters and fixed-wing aircraft using another verification technique, namely reachability analysis. Finally, we show that SkyTrakx can be used to simulate complex scenarios involving heterogeneous vehicles, for testing and performance evaluation in terms of workload and response delays analysis. Our experiments delineate the trade-off between performance and workload across different strategies for generating OVs. 

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5. A multi-agent semi-cooperative unmanned air traffic management model with separation assurance

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejtl.2021.100058  

   Liu, Yanchao (January 2021, EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics)