NormSTAD Flight Analysis Tool Samet AyhanBrendan FruinFan Yang

December 7th, 2012

Visualizing Air Traffic Patterns over the Unites States

Figure used with permission from

Agenda

• Introduction• Data• Demo• Evaluation• Future Work• Conclusion

• National Airspace System (NAS) • A complex non-deterministic system• Impacted continually by major/minor variables

• Weather• Human decisions• Even an insignificant event such as delay in obtaining a wheel chair

for a passenger with disability• Accurate delay forecasts are unavailable• Slots for arrival and departure are missed and reassigned• Constantly, decisions are being made to recover the system • Keep it as close to optimal, given its current state• No method available

• Quantifying the effects of a decision or• Comparing them to an alternate decision

• Wasted fuel, and time resulting in less greener skies, loss of resources

Introduction – What is the problem?

• NormSTAD, a web-based tool• Interactively visualize flight data • Overlay flights with varying time series,

• Detect• Outliers / anomalies• Holding, slow-down, and speed-up patterns

• Discover • Progress of a flight with respect to others• Ascend and descend patterns

• Initiate an effort to further analyze• Rectify the causes • Save money and time• Consume less fuel, have greener skies • Manage air traffic more efficiently

• Stands for Normalized Speed, Time, Altitude, and Distance

Introduction – How does NormSTAD solve?

• Aircraft Situation Display to Industry (ASDI)

• Near real-time air traffic data • Provided by the FAA• Position and flight plan• Basic attributes

• Latitude, • Longitude, • Altitude, • Airspeed, • Departure/arrival airport, • Flight number

• Sampled down (~1/6) for efficiency

Data – ASDI

Demo

• Niche subject matter (ATM) • Used Expert Reviews and Questionnaire• Three subject matter experts (SME)

• One from academia• Two from industry (Retired ATCs)

• Provided with walkthrough/tutorial – 20 minutes• Questionnaire with six sections – 20 minutes• 3 specific tasks to complete – 15 minutes

Evaluation

• Questionnaire with six sections – 20 minutes

• Overall reaction System capabilities• Screen Terminology• Learning Open-ended comments

Evaluation

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Academician

AT Controller 1

AT Controller 2

• Retired AT Controller commented:

• “Hmm, this flight has such a fluctuating vertical flight path!”• You should demonstrate this to the FAA. They would benefit

from using it!”• Academician commented:

• “Very easy to use”• “A novel way of looking at flights”

• Changes per improvement suggestion:• Only summary info displayed in Details on Demand table• Revised the terminology• Enabled multi-select in line chart• Added legend to the line chart

Evaluation

Display all data points– Currently only show sampled data due to implementation constraints

Show airport surface data– We only have en-route data available for NormSTAD, but would like to extend to include airport surface data

Future Work

NormSTAD is a tool that can be used to quickly spot outliers in an easy to use visualization– As seen in demonstration

Outliers or interesting flights can then be further analyzed by other tools

This can result in savings of time and money as a result of an increase in efficiency and fuel consumption is decreased

Conclusion

Special Thanks to

Professor Ben Shneiderman

Professor Michael Ball

Subject Matter Experts

Peer Reviewers

Questions?

Discussion