The future of Air Traffic Flow Management

(I had added this as a comment to the previous blog entry. One of the readers pointed out that this entry should be "elevated" to a real blog entry, because it was an interesting entry. So, I did.)

I wanted to relate the blog-story below of flight delays to one of our Brahms research projects at NASA. Although being delayed for a day is not fun, I do get a kick out of my research touching real-life situations. Not surprising, because in this case our research is about developing new, more collaborative ways to deal with future over-crowding of the US airspace.

In our Collaborative Traffic-Flow Decision Management project, we are studying how the FAA and the airlines can be more collaborative in deciding when and which flights to delay or cancel. Currently, the FAA decides, more or less, on their own which flights to delay. These decisions are made on a two-hour cycle in the US. The unfortunate consequence of delaying or canceling flights is that these have a rippling effect in consecutive flights, both for the airlines and for airline passengers. Our situation today is a consequence of such a decision.

How do airline crews get to their flights on time? Indeed, very often they need to fly to the destination from which the flight is to take off. When a flight is delayed, or cancelled, this means that the crew onboard these flights will also be delayed. Thus. this ripple-effect does not only delay the flight the crew is on, but also the flight that they have to be on next, etc. Often the airlines bring in a "reserve" crew, but this does not always work.

What we are researching, using our Brahms simulation language, are ways in which the airlines can participate with the FAA in deciding what flights to delay. Currently, the airlines cannot provide the FAA with a "wish-list" of actions to take, given certain flight delays. We are using a multi BDI-agent simulation approach to simulate how both airlines and FAA will collaboratively decide which flights to delay. BDI stands for Belief-Desire-Intention and is an AI-based approach, enabling software agents to reason and act based on beliefs they have. Allowing agents to communicate beliefs enables us to use this approach to model multi-party coordination, simulating some sort of "back-and-forth" debate between airlines and FAA.

Given my experience today I wonder, as I had wondered a while back in our research, how we could get passengers to participate in this debate. Wouldn't it have been nice if I could have told the airlines how important it was for me to make my flight to Amsterdam? Maybe, I would have been willing to pay extra to make my flight. If the airlines would have known, and could have taken this priority into account, they could have convinced the FAA to make another decision.

Of course, it is not as simple as that. But, today I am thinking ... it would have been nice! Although, on second thought, I am Dutch and there would have been no way I would have paid more to be there on time ... what's in a day :-)

Day 1 ... not on our way :-(

Woke up this morning by a call from Continental Airlines ... Pls, call as soon as possible ...
Of course, I know what it is, as I am listening to KQED news telling me that it's still raining cats and dogs in Austin, TX.
Flying through Houston this time a year is always taking a chance with weather ... I am sure of it ... I will miss my flight to Amsterdam.

Ok, call the airlines ... Indeed, my flight to Houston is delayed, arriving 8:45pm, instead of the planned 5:45pm, thus missing my connection to Amsterdam at 7:10pm. Why? I am asking the Continental rep. Due to bad weather in Houston? I ask him. To my surprise he says, no, the weather is fine. Then, what is it? And, I am thinking to myself, if I could just have our CDM simulator simulate my flight right now, right here, I could do a "what-if." The answer I get back is crew-delay. What? Crew-delay, are you kidding me?

Yep, my flight to Houston has a crew-delay. Now, didn't they get the memo at the FAA that they should collaborate with the passengers about delaying flights? I can surely fly from San Jose or Oakland, not? No, all booked. The rep says that they have already booked me tonight from Houston to Newark, and then tomorrow morning from Newark to Amsterdam. What? Are they nuts?

So, the end of this story is that we're flying tomorrow on the same flights ... I hope the crew is on time tomorrow :-)

My first blog

Welcome to my blog!!!!

Tonight I have become a blogger. I never thought I would do this, because I feel that blogging is essentially a waste of time. Why? Because I could be doing something else more useful in the physical world instead of spending time writing something for nobody in particular.

So, why start a blog? The answer to this obvious question is that I am on the eve of taking my 18 year old daughter for three weeks on a graduation trip to Europe. Back to the old homeland, since we were both born in The Netherlands. She was three months old when we left, and it has never just been me and her going back together. Now, finally, two months before she will go off to college, she and I will spend three weeks travelling through Holland, Belgium and also Berlin. So, I thought, to keep everyone back home up to speed with what we're doing ... I will try to blog as much as possible, although not more than once per day, and probably less.

Also, while I am on vacation I am planning to finish my book proposal. Indeed, Bill Clancey and I are planning to write a book. About? About Brahms. No, not the composer, but our agent-oriented language for modeling and simulating people and systems, situated in places and doing all kinds of work. After having worked on Brahms for over 15 years, together with Bill Clancey, Ron van Hoof, Mike Scott, Chin Seah, recently Peter Jarvis, and for this summer Matt Keally, we have more than enough material to write a book. Agent programming languages are new and becoming a hot topic, so it is an opportune time to be writing a book about one of those languages. Also, as more people are starting to use Brahms, having a users guide to learn the language is good.

So, the idea is that I will use this blog to post the different chapters of our book. This way, people can give feedback and suggestions. I hope that that will be a useful way to get started, and keep going.

But, for now, in the next three weeks, I'll be writing about our European Vacation. I hope you enjoy it!!! If not, too bad :-)