BYU professor, student work with NASA to solve crowded airspace problem

BYU professor, student work with NASA to solve crowded airspace problem

(Mark A. Philbrick/BYU)


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PROVO — If your flight is delayed this holiday season, know that Andrew Wallace is trying to help.

The problem is this: While U.S. airport traffic continues to rise, the number of air traffic controllers — the workers who orchestrate incoming and outgoing flights so everybody safely gets to where they need to go — is down.

BYU computer science professor Eric Mercer and student Andrew Wallace are now helping NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration figure out a solution.

Wallace, a senior, said he weighed several different career paths — from construction management to pharmacy to dentistry — before settling on computer science.

"I always thought I wouldn't want to be sitting at a desk doing the same thing every day," he said.

An intro computer science class with Mercer led to him joining Mercer's research team and landing a summer internship at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, where he worked on this issue.

"The big problem is when you don't get departures off the ground, gates start to fill up, runways start to fill up, and that costs the airlines money, that costs travelers money," Mercer said. "It's bad for everyone."

Their timing was good. The number of air traffic controllers is at its lowest level in 27 years, according to officials at the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. In October, officials at the union announced that the shortage had reached a crisis point, with air traffic controllers at some of the busiest facilities, like in Dallas, working six days a week for years and reporting widespread chronic fatigue.

Left unchecked, the pressure on air traffic controllers will lead to widespread flight delays and potential safety issues, officials said.

Mercer and Wallace are working on an algorithm that will allow a small number of air traffic controllers to get as many planes off the runway as quickly and safely as possible.

To do so, they're designing a simulation that will model how controllers think.

"We're actually modeling the decisions that the controller makes with a piece of software," Mercer said. "With the power of computing, we're able to run those models tens of thousands of times very quickly, changing little things each time — try this procedure, have the controllers behave this way, what if we had this new piece of automation."

They're basing their simulations on LaGuardia Airport in New York, known to be one of the most frequently delayed airports in the U.S.

In a typical 90-minute simulation, 100 flights will arrive and 40 will depart, all managed by nine air traffic controllers making decisions and performing tasks that can seem small but are critical: choosing the order of the landings or departures, alerting controllers in the next airspace that a plane is entering, even accounting for personal drones that come into the airspace.

They're looking for the algorithm that will allow the most departures and the least amount of stress for the overworked controllers.

It's highly complex stuff with a lot of variables and with a high need for accuracy.

"It's not really something that you can kind of just look up in a book or look for a specific answer online," Wallace said.

The project is a collaboration with Neha Rungta, a researcher at the NASA Ames Research Center, who was also Wallace's internship mentor.

Computer science student Andrew Wallace is working with NASA to improve air traffic congestion by designing simulations that imitate the workload of air traffic controllers. He's had to comprehensively cover the ins and outs of every possible aircraft — including personal drones — that could enter the airspace over New York's LaGuardia Airport. (Photo: Mark A. Philbrick/BYU)
Computer science student Andrew Wallace is working with NASA to improve air traffic congestion by designing simulations that imitate the workload of air traffic controllers. He's had to comprehensively cover the ins and outs of every possible aircraft — including personal drones — that could enter the airspace over New York's LaGuardia Airport. (Photo: Mark A. Philbrick/BYU)

The hope is that the program will be sophisticated enough to replace NASA's current software, which can't be customized for individual air traffic controllers. And if it's accurate enough, it could reduce the need for the simulations that NASA relies on now, in which they recruit retired air traffic controllers and run through the scenarios manually.

Wallace has been working with Mercer on the program for more than a year, including a summer at NASA interviewing air traffic controllers and working on a visualization tool for the program, mentored by Rungta.

His internship was funded through the Utah Space Grant and NASA internship program.

"It was a pleasure to mentor him through the summer," said Rungta, who called Wallace a "bright undergraduate" and told BYU that Wallace's work on the visualization tool was "key" to being able to understand the complex scenarios in the project.

The simulation project is expected to take years to complete, by which time Wallace will have graduated. But he said he will continue to pursue a career in computer science.

"I've always enjoyed math and solving problems," he said. "And it turns out, I don't mind sitting at a desk."


Daphne Chen is a reporter for the Deseret News and KSL.com. Contact her at dchen@deseretnews.com.

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