Management and Operations Commons^™

Bitseat: Reimagining The Financing For Airliners Using Nonfungible Tokens (Blockchain Technology), Edwin S. Ongola

Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering

This essay describes how blockchain technology, particularly nonfungible tokens, can be used to raise funding for airliners. The essay begins with a brief overview on the costs, categories, and acquisition methods of airliners. After that, the essay introduces concepts on blockchain technology, tokens, and smart contracts. The essay then touches on how nonfungible tokens can be used to facilitate fractional ownership of airliners. From there, the essay discusses Bitseat, a conceptual nonfungible token for fractional ownership of airliners, covering its overall design, appeal, marketplace alternatives, and challenges. Finally, in the discussion, the essay summarizes the overall concept and outlines its …

Meeting The Moment With Ai-Employer Informed Education, Brent Terwilliger, John Faraca

Publications

As artificial intelligence transforms aviation, aerospace, and autonomy-related sectors, higher education must adapt to meet evolving workforce demands. This session shares emerging findings from a nationwide study led by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, focused on employer perceptions of AI adoption, responsible use, and workforce preparedness in domains including uncrewed systems, space systems, robotics, and advanced air mobility. Based on a structured survey and follow-up interviews, the presentation explores how organizations are using AI tools, from generative platforms to enterprise systems, and defining effective and inappropriate use in operational contexts. Participants will gain insight into critical concerns (e.g., data privacy, compliance, security, …

Network-Aware Airline-Specific Flight Delay Prediction Using Tree-Based Ensemble Models, Mary Dufie Afrane

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Flight delays pose persistent challenges to the efficiency and reliability of air transportation systems, affecting airlines, airports, regulators, and passengers alike. As traffic demand grows and operational environments become increasingly interconnected, accurately predicting both departure and arrival delays has become crucial for effective planning and mitigation. This study presents a network-aware, airline-specific framework for predicting flight delays in U.S. domestic air transportation systems using tree-based ensemble machine learning models. A large-scale dataset of 1.98 million flights, enriched with weather information, is used to develop predictive models for both departure and arrival delays. To capture the structural and operational complexity of …

Beyond The Blue Skies: A Comprehensive Guide For Risk Assessment In Aviation, Leila Halawi, Mark Miller, Sam Holley

Publications

Risk assessment in aviation is a critical process that safeguards the safety and reliability of operations. Aviation operations encompass inherent risks, from mechanical failures to human errors and environmental factors. The significance of these risks may be severe, leading to accidents, injuries, and loss of life. Recognizing and mitigating risks is supreme in this dynamic environment, where emerging technologies and innovation constantly reshape this industry. This chapter includes an in-depth explanation of risk management and analysis, leading to the core elements of risk assessment specifically for aviation operations. We will describe the process and explore some of the applications and …

Smart Airports: Artificial Intelligence–Enabled Internet Of Things Networks Using Blockchain Technology, Edwin Ongola

Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering

This article provides a perspective on how an internet of heterogeneous self-service airport terminal systems can be used for data collection, which is stored on a private or consortium blockchain depending on the ownership or operations of an airport or both. Such a setup would help to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve traveler experience at airport terminals. Moreover, it would allow airports to gather data directly from passengers as opposed to waiting to receive the same data from airlines. Subsequently, this data, now on a blockchain system, becomes a data source for other applications such as machine learning. In …

Representation Learning For Generative Models With Applications To Healthcare, Astronautics, And Aviation, Van Minh Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores applications of representation learning and generative models to challenges in healthcare, astronautics, and aviation.

The first part investigates the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to synthesize realistic electronic health record (EHR) data. An initial attempt at training a GAN on the MIMIC-IV dataset encountered stability and convergence issues, motivating a deeper study of 1-Lipschitz regularization techniques for Auxiliary Classifier GANs (AC-GANs). An extensive ablation study on the CIFAR-10 dataset found that Spectral Normalization is key for AC-GAN stability and performance, while Weight Clipping fails to converge without Spectral Normalization. Analysis of the training dynamics provided further …

Railroad Condition Monitoring Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing And Deep Learning Techniques, Md Arifur Rahman

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Proper condition monitoring has been a major issue among railroad administrations since it might cause catastrophic dilemmas that lead to fatalities or damage to the infrastructure. Although various aspects of train safety have been conducted by scholars, in-motion monitoring detection of defect occurrence, cause, and severity is still a big concern. Hence extensive studies are still required to enhance the accuracy of inspection methods for railroad condition monitoring (CM). Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) has been recognized as a promising method because of its sensing capabilities over long distances and for massive structures. As DAS produces large datasets, algorithms for precise …

Integrating External Sensors With Crazyflie Drones, Xiaowen Wang, Dheryta Jaisinghani, Andrew Berns

Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) Symposium

• Drones are widely used: Mini drones such as Crazyflie 2.1 are used in a variety of fields.
• Grove Sound Sensor function: Grove Sound Sensor can capture sound, providing more application possibilities for drones.
• The potential of Crazyflie 2.1: Although Crazyflie 2.1 has the potential to be an integrated sensor platform, prior to this project, it was uncertain whether sensors could be connected on it.
• Project motivation: Our project aims to explore whether Crazyflie 2.1 can be connected to the Grove Sound Sensor and collect and process data from the sensor.
• Impact of the project: If successful, this project will open …

A Deep Bilstm Machine Learning Method For Flight Delay Prediction Classification, Desmond B. Bisandu, Irene Moulitsas

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

This paper proposes a classification approach for flight delays using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models. Flight delays are a major issue in the airline industry, causing inconvenience to passengers and financial losses to airlines. The BiLSTM and LSTM models, powerful deep learning techniques, have shown promising results in a classification task. In this study, we collected a dataset from the United States (US) Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) of flight on-time performance information and used it to train and test the BiLSTM and LSTM models. We set three criteria for selecting highly important features …

Directional Speaker Poster, Eugene Ng, Bryan Wong, Ruhaan Das

Student Works

Changi Airport is set to expand with a new terminal, Terminal 5. Currently, many of the airport's processes are manual, requiring a high dependence on staff. This proposal aims to incorporate automation and AI for a smoother passenger experience.

Scheduling Aircraft Departures To Avoid Enroute Congestion, Johannes Martinez

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

When scheduled flights are forecast to overcrowd sections of enroute airspace, an air traffic control authority may need to delay departures. Mixed integer linear programming can be used to compute a schedule that resolves the congestion while bringing the sum of all delays to a minimum. Standard linear programming constraint formulations for such scheduling problems, however, have poor run times for instances of realistic size. A new constraint formulation based on cycles and paths through a route graph reduces run times in computational experiments. It shows particularly strong performance for schedules that approach the worst-case solution times in standard formulations.

Evaluating Annual Fixed Wing Maintenance Costs, Kirsten Bunecke, Edward D. White, Jonathan D. Ritschel, Brett A. Bush

Faculty Publications

This article serves two purposes: first, to empirically model the annual percentage increase of operations and support (O&S) costs for fixed wing aircraft; and second, to place into the archival realm another reference for other researchers to consider when investigating other O&S topics. For this study of 21 different airframes grouped together at the Mission- Design Series (MDS), maintenance subcategories 3.1 Consumable Materials and Repair Parts, 3.2 Depot Level Repairables (DLR), and 3.4 Depot Maintenance accounted for an average 91.5% of annual organic maintenance costs. For contractor-maintained MDS, subcategory 3.7, Contractor Logistics Support (CLS) accounted for 96.6% of annual maintenance …

Space Operations In The Suborbital Space Flight Simulator And Mission Control Center: Lessons Learned With Xcor Lynx, Pedro Llanos, Christopher Nguyen, David Williams, Kim O. Chambers, Erik Seedhouse, Robert Davidson

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

This study was conducted to better understand the performance of the XCOR Lynx vehicle. Because the Lynx development was halted, the best knowledge of vehicle dynamics can only be found through simulator flights. X-Plane 10 was chosen for its robust applications and accurate portrayal of dynamics on a vehicle in flight. The Suborbital Space Flight Simulator (SSFS) and Mission Control Center (MCC) were brought to the Applied Aviation Sciences department in fall 2015 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach campus. This academic and research tool is a department asset capable of providing multiple fields of data about suborbital simulated flights. …

Visually Analyzing The Impacts Of Essential Air Service Funding Decisions, Rohan Kashuka, Chittayong Surakitbanharn, Calvin Yau, David S. Ebert

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Essential Air Service (EAS) is a U.S. government subsidy program which ensures maintenance of commercial airline services in small deregulated communities. The program’s budget currently is around $250 million annually, which is used as subsidy for airlines to maintain a minimal level of scheduled air service in relatively smaller airports. It is evident that 2% of the FAA budget is being spent to maintain air service in smaller communities, but there is not enough evidence to prove that all the current decisions made by Congress about EAS are advantageous. To understand these decisions, 15 years of data produced by the …

Structured Hypermedia Application Development Model (Shadm): A Structured Model For Technical Documentation Application Design, Peter W. Cassell

Theses and Dissertations

This research was conducted to determine how a Royal Australian Air Force technical maintenance publication could be transformed into a task oriented hypermedia application and to develop a model that could be used for future similar transformations. The model was developed following in-depth analysis of the existing USAF F-15E maintenance publication set and validation was conducted using a prototype developed in HyperWriter, a commercial hypermedia product. The prototype model was based around the performance of three maintenance tasks on an aircraft sub-subsystem and incorporated online user access to the necessary support data for task completion. Publication managers, producers, and users …