Events & News
Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Tuesday, February 14, 2012 |
| Time | 11:00 am |
| Concludes | 12:00 pm |
| Location | Gould-Simpson 906 |
| Speaker | Joseph S.B. Mitchell |
| Title | Professor |
| Affiliation | Stony Brook University |
ComputationalGeometry Approaches to Some Algorithmic Problems in Air Traffic Management
The next generation of air transportation system will have to use technology to be able to cope with the ever increasing demand for flights. Several challenging optimization problems arise in trying to maximize efficiency while maintaining safe operation in air traffic management (ATM). Constraints and issues unique to air transportation arise in the ATM domain, including weather hazards, turbulence, no-fly zones, and three-dimensional routing. The challenge is substantially compounded when the constraints vary in time and are not known with certainty, as is the case with weather hazards. Human oversight is provided by air traffic controllers, who are responsible for safe operation within a portion of airspace known as a sector.
In this talk we discuss algorithmic methods that can be used in modeling and solving air traffic management problems, including routing of traffic flows, airspace configuration into load-balanced sectors, and capacity estimation in the face of dynamic and uncertain constraints and demands. We highlight several open problems.
Biography
Joseph S. B. Mitchell received a BS (1981, Physics and Applied Mathematics), and an MS (1981, Mathematics) from Carnegie-Mellon University, and Ph.D. (1986, Operations Research) from Stanford University (under advisorship of Christos Papadimitriou). Mitchell was with Hughes Research Labs (1981-86) and then on the faculty of Cornell University (1986-1991). He now serves as Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Research Professor of Computer Science at the University at Stony Brook. Mitchell has received various research awards (ACM Fellow, 2010 Goedel Prize, NSF Presidential Young Investigator, Fulbright Scholar, President's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities) and numerous teaching awards. His primary research area is computational geometry, applied to problems in computer graphics, visualization, air traffic management, manufacturing, and geographic information systems. Mitchell has served for several years on the Computational Geometry Steering Committee, often as Chair. He is on the editorial board of the journals Discrete and Computational Geometry, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, Journal of Computational Geometry, and the Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications, and is an Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications. He has served on numerous program committees and was co-chair of the PC for the 21st ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry (2005).