Junzi Sun

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Control and Operations (C&O)

Wind and temperature data are important parameters in aircraft performance studies. The lack of accurate measurements of these parameters forces researchers to rely on numerical weather prediction models, which are often filtered for a larger area with decreased local accuracy. Aircraft, however, also transmit information related to weather conditi...

The aerodynamic properties of an aircraft determine a crucial part of the aircraft performance model. Deriving accurate aerodynamic coefficients requires detailed knowledge of the aircraft's design. These designs and parameters are well protected by aircraft manufacturers. They rarely can be used in public research. Very detailed aerodynamic models...

This article investigates the estimation of aircraft mass and thrust settings of departing aircraft using a recursive Bayesian method called particle filtering. The method is based on a nonlinear state-space system derived from aircraft point-mass performance models. Using only aircraft surveillance data, flight states such as position, velocity, w...

A large number of stakeholders exist in the modern air traffic management ecosystem. Air transportation studies benefit from collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and findings between these different players. However, not all parties have equal access to information. Due to the lack of open-source tools and models, it is not always possible to...

Air transport poses significant environmental challenges, particularly the contribution of flight contrails to climate change due to their potential global warming impact. Detecting contrails from satellite images has been a long-standing challenge. Traditional computer vision techniques have limitations under varying image conditions, and machine...

In this paper, we analyze two months of trajectory data for aircraft landing in five major European airports. Based on open ADS-B data from the OpenSky Network and open performance models, we enrich all trajectories with automatically detected procedure information, fuel consumption, and emissions for supported aircraft types. To assess the ineffic...

This paper addresses the problem of spatiotemporal wind velocity field estimation for air traffic management applications. Using data obtained from aircraft, the eastward and northward components of the wind velocity field inside a specific air space are calculated as functions of time. Both short-term wind velocity field forecasting and wind veloc...

In submitting conference proceedings to Engineering Proceedings, the volume editors of the proceedings certify to the publisher that all papers published in this volume have been subjected to peer review administered by the volume editors [...]

Civil aviation contributes to rising global greenhouse gas emissions. Flights carried out by private and business jets are only a very small fraction of commercial passenger flights. However, these private flights are extremely environmentally inefficient and account for the most emissions per passenger in the aviation sector. While the commercial...

The usage of large private and business jets, from those owned by Elon Musk to Kylie Jenner and Bernard Arnault, has recently attracted considerable attention in many countries. Enabled by open and crowdsourced aircraft tracking systems based on the automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast protocol, the aircraft and their owners have been scrutin...

One of the biggest challenges facing the aerospace industry today is its sustainability. As the number of flights is expected to rise globally, aviation's climate impact will continue to increase. Current research has extensively addressed the rerouting of aircraft through wind-optimization in order to minimize fuel burn and emissions. Such optimiz...

Wind velocity field knowledge is crucial for the future air traffic management paradigm and is key in many applications, such as aircraft performance studies. This paper addresses the problem of spatio-temporal windc velocity field estimation. The north and east wind components within a given air space are estimated as a function of time. Both wind...

The environmental impact of aviation has become the focus of increased concerns for policymakers around the world. The recent pandemic provided many interesting case studies on the impact of aviation on the environment. Following the initial COVID-19 containment measures and hard lock-downs, the sharp decrease in aircraft movements caused a measura...

This work addresses the problem of vertical wind profile online estimation at a given location. Specifically, the north and east components of the wind are continuously estimated as functions of time and altitude at two waypoints used for landing on the Adolfo Suarez Madrid-Barajas airport. A continuous nowcast of the wind profile is performed in w...

Efforts to minimise the environmental impact of aviation can be implemented at several levels including electric green taxiing systems, novel propulsion systems, jet fuels, improvements in aircraft efficiency and optimisation of climb profiles. In this paper, we address the optimisation of flight plans in a route network considering operational par...

Sustainability is the biggest challenge facing the aerospace industry today. With the global number of flights expected to rise, the climate impact of aviation will continue to increase. Current research states that the rerouting of aircraft through wind-optimisation for the purpose of fuel usage minimisation and emission reduction is an effective...

Aviation is a growing source of atmospheric emissions impacting the Earth’s climate and air quality. Comprehensive assessments of the environmental impact of this industry require up-to-date, spatially resolved, and speciated emissions inventories. We develop and evaluate the first such estimate of global emissions from aircraft operations for the...

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) enables aircraft to periodically broadcast their flight states such as position and velocity. Compared to classical radar surveillance, it increases update rate and accuracy. Currently, Mode S Extended Squitter is the most common implementation for ADS-B. Due to the simplicity of Mode S design, ADS...

In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach that estimates cruise-level flight emissions over Europe using OpenSky ADS-B data and OpenAP emission models. Flight information, including position, altitude, speed, and the vertical rate are obtained from the OpenSky historical database, gathered at a sample rate of 15 s. Emissions from each flight...

The METeo Sensors in the Sky (METSIS) project, funded by SESAR's Engage knowledge transfer network, investigated the use of drones as an aerial wind sensor network for U-space applications. The concept aims to provide accurate, low-cost and hyperlocal wind nowcasts for drones using data collected by drones themselves and the Meteo-Particle Model (M...

The year 2020 had been selected by EU and US regulators as the deadline for ADS-B compliant Mode S transponders, following various iterations of ADS-B and Mode S services. It will also be remembered as marking a profound change in civil aviation, when the global virus outbreak triggered an unprecedented slowdown in traffic and brought immense impac...

Aircraft trajectory generation is a widely addressed problem with applications including emergency trajectory generation , collision risk models, air traffic flow and capacity management or airspace design. State of the art methods to generate individual trajectories and optimise some performance or emergency criterion may lack of realism with resp...

Accurate wind information is crucial in air traffic management, for instance, to improve trajectory predictability and precision in controlled time of arrival. Nowadays, air traffic management relies on Numerical Weather Prediction, which usually has a low resolution and low update rate. A potential approach for improving the resolution and accurac...

The vertical trajectory plan (altitude and speed) corresponding to the descent phase of a modern airliner is computed by the on-board flight management system while the aircraft is still in cruise. As long as the constraints on the arrival procedure allow, this system plans for an idle descent and the exact location of the (optimal) top of descent...

In the last twenty years, aircraft surveillance has moved from controller-based interrogation to automatic broadcast. The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is the most common method for aircraft to report their state information like identity, position, and speed. Like other Mode S communications, ADS-B makes use of the 1090 megahe...

The large amount of aircraft trajectory data publicly available through open data sources like the OpenSky Network presents a wide range of possibilities for monitoring and post-operational analysis of air traffic performance. This contribution addresses the automatic identification of operational events associated with trajectories. This is a chal...

Mode S surveillance allows air traffic controllers to interrogate certain informationfrom aircraft, such as airspeeds, turn parameters, target altitudes, and meteorological conditions.However, not allaircraft have enabled the same capabilities. Before performing any specificinterrogation, the surveillance radar must acquire the transponder capabili...

Due to the increasing demands for real-time air traffic monitoring, the 1090 megahertz radio frequency has become the most utilized communication channel for aircraft surveillance purposes. Several services are using the radio frequency at the same time, which are Mode A/C communications and Mode S communications. These different types of communica...

Air traffic simulations serve as common practice to evaluate different concepts and methods for air transportation studies. The aircraft performance model is a key element that supports these simulation-based studies. It is also an important component for simulation-independent studies, such as air traffic optimization and prediction studies. Commo...

Air traffic simulation is a common practice for air transportation studies to evaluate different concepts and methods. The aircraft performance model is a key element that supports these simulations based studies. It is also an important component for simulation independent studies such as air traffic optimization and prediction. Commonly, most of...

In air traffic management research, aircraft performance models are often used to generate and analyze aircraft trajectories. Although a crucial part of the aircraft performance model, the aerodynamic property of aircraft is rarely available for public research purposes, as it is protected by aircraft manufacturers for commercial reasons. In many s...

The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data has become one of the most popular sources of data for trajectory-based ATM studies. It is can be received in most of the world without restrictions. Extended coverage can be achieved with a network of low-cost receivers and satellites. However, the fact that ADS-B is designed to contain o...

A large quantity of Mode S data is being gathered by the OpenSky receiver network every day. Information regarding common flight states, such as position, ground speed, and the vertical rate is broadcast by ADS-B and has already been decoded and made available for researchers via the OpenSky historical database. However, there is still a large amou...

Open access to flight data from Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) has provided researchers with more insights for air traffic management than aircraft tracking alone. With large quantities of trajectory data collected from a wide range of different aircraft types, it is possible to extract accurate aircraft performance parameters....

This paper focuses on estimating aircraft mass and thrust setting using a recursive Bayesian method called particle filtering. The method is based on a nonlinear state-space system derived from aircraft point-mass performance models. Using solely ADS-B and ModeS data, flight states such as position, velocity, and wind speed are collected and used f...

Abstract Aircraft mass is a crucial piece of information for studies on aircraft performance, trajectory prediction, and many other topics of aircraft traffic management. However, It is a common challenge for researchers, as well as air traffic control, to access this proprietary information. Previously, several studies have proposed methods to est...

Wind is an important parameter in many air traffic management researches, as it often introduces significant uncertainties in aircraft performance studies and trajectory predictions. Obtaining accurate wind field information has always been a challenge due to the availability of weather sensors. Traditionally, there is no direct method to measure w...

Open access to flight data from ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast) has provided researchers more insights for air traffic management than aircraft tracking alone. With large quantities of trajectory data collected from a wide range of different aircraft types, it is possible to extract accurate aircraft performance parameters. In th...

To investigate the contradicting findings of previous studies that investigated ADS-B quality, a study was performed to analyze the data and signal quality of ADS-B. For this study, a large dataset of raw ADS-B messages was analyzed, regarding the quality of the data and the signal, differentiating between internal and external sources of errors. T...

Aircraft mass is a crucial piece of information for studies on aircraft performance, trajectory prediction, and many other ATM topics. However, it is a common challenge for researchers who have no access to this proprietary information. Previously, several studies have proposed methods to estimates aircraft weight, most of which are focused on spec...

Aircraft mass is an important parameter in many ways, either to build aircraft performance models, to predict flight trajectories, or to simulate air traffic. Mass data is usually considered as sensitive information for airlines and is, therefore, not disclosed to researchers publicly. In this paper, we use two methods to infer the mass of an aircr...

With the increasing availability of ADS-B transpon-ders on commercial aircraft, as well as the rapidly growing deployment of ground stations that provide public access to their data, accessing open aircraft flight data is becoming easier for researchers. Given the large number of operational aircraft, significant amounts of flight data can be decod...

Recently there has been a growing interest in mission operations scheduling problem. The problem, in a variety of formulations, arises in management of satellite/space missions requiring efficient allocation of user requests to make possible the communication between operations teams and spacecraft systems. Not only large space agencies, such as ES...

Recently there has been a growing interest in mission operations scheduling problem. The problem, in a variety of formulations, arises in management of satellite/space missions requiring efficient allocation of user requests to make possible the communication between operations teams and spacecraft systems. Not only large space agencies, such as ES...

Ground station scheduling problem arises in spacecraft operations and aims to allocate ground stations to spacecraft to make possible the communication between operations teams and spacecraft systems. The problem belongs to the family of satellite scheduling for the specific case of mapping communications to ground stations. Ground stations are ter...

In this paper we address the resolution of the Ground Station Scheduling problem by Genetic Algorithms. Ground Stations (GS) are required during spacecraft (S/C) operations to provide communications links between operations teams and the S/C systems. Basic communication types, such as telemetry, tele-command and tracking, are all supported by the s...