Determining drone based surveillance locations for virtual airport tower in a complex airport with mixed integer programming (MIP)

Abstract

With the expectation that air travel figures will double over the next two decades and the recent increase in incursion incidents, one of the solutions is to build multiple Air Traffic Control Tower (ATCT). However, due to limited land space, it poses a challenge in finding the optimal ATCT locations (position and height) while satisfying both visibility and obstruction constraints. In addition, fixed ATCT has limited runway visibility in poor weather conditions such as fog. As such, building multiple ATCT is not feasible.

The motivation of this Final Year Project (FYP) is to promote the availability of two new technology such as drone and virtual ATCT relying on surveillance cameras. The use of drone takes away the requirement of fixed ATCT since movable drone can provide flexible air traffic visibility in a complex airport layout. A mixed integer programming (MIP) exists in the theory-oriented literature about identifying the tower location and height supported with a visual analytic test. To cater to the different obstruction scenarios and dynamic runway configurations, the author has generated the MIP codes with the inclusion of runway and polygon selection, line of sight, visibility and obstruction constraints.

Chicago O’Hare International airport was picked for this study as it comes with seven runways. This leads to a complicated and variable runway configuration that poses a challenge for Air Traffic Controller (ATC) to establish visual reference of operating runways concurrently.

With consideration of the various constraints mentioned, the power of computing will generate the best locations (position and height) to place the drones based on the runway and polygon selected by the user. By analysing the generated result for different runway configuration based on Chicago O’Hare daily operating time, one drone operation can monitor at least 50% of the runway. Two or more drone operation can monitor up to 100% of the runway.