Update: Stephanie Sherman’s work on air traffic management has won her a Virginia Space Grant Consortium graduate student research grant and an Airport Cooperative Research Program Graduate Research Award!  Stephanie is working to develop a computational model of air traffic based upon a smoothed particle hydrodynamics-esque definition of aircraft interactions (like particle interactions in SPH).  Through this approach, her tool will be able to model stochastic aircraft characteristics in addition to deterministic characteristics.  Fundamentally, she is trying to provide a tool which can help address two important and challenging problems:

1. Model aircraft interactions in a  decentralized control scheme versus the current centralized control approach (e.g. the bulk of aircraft interactions being governed by instructions from air traffic controllers).
2. Model manned and unmanned aircraft interact with non-deterministic factors (e.g. pilot skill, aircraft handling, etc…)

Both of these topics are of interest for study as part of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen).

To learn more about her excellent work, follow the tag for S_Sherman.

Stephanie Sherman’s work on air traffic management has won her a Virginia Space Grant Consortium graduate student research grant!  To learn more about her excellent work, follow the tag for S_Sherman.