Yanjun Wang

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Most of Level 3 airports worldwide face severe congestion and flight delays. Optimal allocating airport slots is one of the most effective ways in airport demand management. Here we systematically review the progress of research in airport slots allocation, as well as the main techniques in setting airport declared capacity and allocating slots.

We propose an on-demand airport slot management (ODASM) approach to guide slot fire-break capacity setup and airport slot allocation. The ODASM consists of a tree-structured capacity profile and a coadapted fire-break setting and slot allocation model. The tree-structured capacity profile that is constructed using a decision tree aims to capture va...

Slot allocation in a single airport aims to maximize the utilization of airport-declared capacity under operational and regulation constraints, while that in a multi-airport system (MAS) has to take airspace capacity into account. This is due to the fact that the conflict of using the limited capacity of certain departure/arrival fixes in the termi...

The increasing deterioration of urban traffic congestion has led to the emergence of Urban Air Mobility (UAM). UAM seeks to reduce congestion by offering flexible and efficient aerial transportation using electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). As UAM evolves, the guarantee of the effectiveness an...

Air traffic controllers play a crucial role in overseeing and managing dynamic flight operations. The issue of their fatigue is intrinsically linked to aviation safety, thus detecting fatigue states in controllers is vital for operational control and training. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the methods and research on detecting fatig...

Prior research on slot allocation has focused on a single airport, with little attention paid to the multiple-airport systems (MAS) that consist of at least two major airports. Scheduled flights at different airports may have conflicts regarding shared fixes (i.e., route points) or routes, thus causing airspace congestion and flight delays. Traffic...

As demand for air transport continues to grow, the complexity of the operating environment of air traffic has intensified. Air Traffic Controllers (ATCos) are faced with the critical task of making timely decisions in response to rapidly changing air traffic. In this context, maintaining Situation Awareness (SA) becomes critical, directly influenci...

Transportation is the main carrier of population movement, so it is significant to clarify how different transportation modes influence epidemic transmission. This paper verified the relationship between different levels of facilities and epidemic transmission by use of the K-means clustering method and the Mann–Whitney U test. Next, quantile regre...

Fatigue detection for air traffic controllers is an important yet challenging problem in aviation safety research. Most of the existing methods for this problem are based on facial features. In this paper, we propose an ensemble learning model that combines both facial features and voice features and design a fatigue detection method through multif...

A multiple-airport system (MAS) consists of more than two airports in a metropolitan area under a large block of terminal airspace that is managed by one or two air traffic control units. When the capacity of an airport or of the terminal airspace drops, flight delays occur in the MAS system. A quick estimation and predication of traffic congestion...

Flight delays persist and spread in airport networks due to high interconnectivity in the air transportation infrastructure. How quickly delay propagates between two airports is determined by factors such as the number of flights between airports, the duration of the flight, presence of disruptions, and schedule buffers. Accurate estimation of the...

Safety is a top priority for civil aviation. Data mining in digital Flight Data Recorder (FDR) or Quick Access Recorder (QAR) data, commonly referred to as black box data on aircraft, has gained interest for proactive safety management. New anomaly detection methods, primarily clustering methods, have been developed to monitor pilot operations and...

En-route congestion causes delays in air traffic networks and will become more prominent as air traffic demand will continue to increase yet airspace volume cannot grow. However, most existing studies on flight delay modeling do not consider en-route congestion explicitly. In this study, we propose a new flight delay model, Multi-layer Air Traffic...

Investigation of passenger flight delays with statistical physics has been less focused by previous researchers. We consider the flights as special particles, and take quasi-thermodynamic variables to describe their van der Waals - like gaseous equations. Improved from our former model, we download data of 6 more years (2015–2020) with 20 original...

Incorporating resilience into the airline's network planning and assessment prepares the airline for disruptive events. To measure and improve the resilience of an airline's network, quantitative or qualitative metrics are required. In this work, we first propose a novel modeling approach by the leverage of temporal network theory to analyze the re...

Air traffic controllers have to make quick decisions to keep air traffic safe. Their behaviors have a significant impact on the operation of the air traffic management (ATM) system. Automation tools have enhanced the ATM system’s capability by reducing the controller’s task-load. Much attention has been devoted to developing advanced automation in...

Eye movement is an important indicator of information-seeking behavior and provides insight into cognitive strategies which are vital for decision-making. Various measures based on eye movements have been proposed to capture humans’ ability to process information in a complex environment. The effectiveness of these measures has not yet been fully e...

Flight delays occur around the world every day, which can bring substantial economic losses to airlines and cause chaos for air traffic and passengers. To reduce these negative impacts, we should find the statistical law of the flight system. By using the record of 20 years American domestic passenger flights among N airports, we define the instant...

En-route congestion causes delays in air traffic networks and will become more prominent as air traffic demand will continue to increase yet airspace volume cannot grow. However, most existing studies on flight delay modeling do not consider en-route congestion explicitly. In this study, we propose a new flight delay model, Multi-layer Air Traffic...

Air travelers’ behavior is closely related to the operational performance of any airport terminal. Much of previous research has focused on how airport operators balance the number of facilities in a terminal and the Level of Service (LOS), while the behavior of passengers is less considered. Not much is known, however, about passenger’s behavior d...

Recent studies have characterized the structures of air transport network in different countries and regions using complex network metrics. These studies coincided with the trend of increasingly available large empirical flight datasets that enable researchers to investigate the dynamics of the system, such as the propagation of flight delay. Howev...

Safety is a top priority for civil aviation. Data mining in digital Flight Data Recorder (FDR) or Quick Access Recorder (QAR) data, commonly referred as black box data on aircraft, has gained interest from researchers, airlines, and aviation regulation agencies for safety management. New anomaly detection methods based on supervised or unsupervised...

Flight delays have negative impacts on passengers, carriers, and airports. To reduce these unpopular influence, we need to find the statistical law of the collective behavior of passenger flights. We use a mean-field approach to analyze big data listing the departure and arrival records of all American domestic passenger flights in 20 years. We tre...

Departure delays are a major cause of economic loss and inefficiency in the growing industry of passenger flights. A departure delay of a current flight is inevitably affected by the late arrival of the flight immediately preceding it with the same aircraft. We seek to understand the mechanisms of such propagated delays, and to obtain universal met...

Network science has been a promising tool for characterizing and understanding complex systems. A challenging problem in network science is to uncover the community structure of the network. Community structure generally presents the partition of the nodes in the network into several groups based on various structural properties or dynamic behavior...

This paper explores the internal mechanism of flight departure delay for the Delta Air Lines (IATA-Code: DL) from the viewpoint of statistical law. We roughly divide all of delay factors into two sorts: propagation factor (PF), and nonpropagation factors (NPF). From the statistical results, we find that the distribution of the flight departure dela...

Scheduled block time (SBT) is the duration between scheduled departure time and scheduled arrival time of a given flight. SBTs have a significant impact on airline operations and performance, and airlines consider various factors in setting them. Recent studies have proposed several models for understanding U.S. airlines’ SBT-setting behavior and h...

Resilience is the ability of a system to withstand and stay operational in the face of an unexpected disturbance or unpredicted changes. Recent studies on air transport system resilience focus on topology characteristics after the disturbance and measure the robustness of the network with respect to connectivity. The dynamic processes occurring at...

This paper evaluates the congestion spillover effects of the “big three” Chinese hub airports – Beijing Capital (PEK), Shanghai Pudong (PVG), and Guangzhou Baiyun (CAN) – on international connecting traffic with 20 worldwide hubs between 2010 and 2017. We find that the spillover effects, or “avoidance” of the major Chinese hubs, have different spat...

Passenger flight delays, causing much disorder of air traffics, economic losses of airlines, and downgrading the travel quality of millions of people, are ubiquitous phenomena in airports all over the world. Investigation based on real data from the view point of statistical physics is rarely seen. In the present work, big data of such delay record...

Air route network optimization, one of the essential parts of the airspace planning, is an effective way to optimize airspace resources, increase airspace capacity, and alleviate air traffic congestion. However, little has been done on the optimization of air route network in the fragmented airspace caused by prohibited, restricted, and dangerous a...

The distribution of the geometric distances of connected neurons is a practical factor underlying neural networks in the brain. It can affect the brain\'s dynamic properties at the ground level. Karbowski derived a power-law decay distribution that has not yet been verified by experiment. In this work, we check its validity using simulations with a...

The distribution of the geometric distances of connected neurons is a practical factor underlying neural networks in the brain. It can affect the brain\'s dynamic properties at the ground level. Karbowski derived a power-law decay distribution that has not yet been verified by experiment. In this work, we check its validity using simulations with a...

Flight delay happens every day in airports all over the world. However, systemic investigation in large scales remains a challenge. We collect primary data of domestic departure records from Bureau of Transportation Statistics of United States, and do empirical statistics with them in form of complementary cumulative distributions functions (CCDFs)...

There has been an increasing role played by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications in recent decades. In particular, centimeter/decimetre positioning accuracy is required for some safety related applications, such as lane control, collision avoidance, and intelligent speed assistance. Lane...

Abstract Air transport network, or airport network, is a complex network involving numerous airports. Effective management of the air transport system requires an in-depth understanding of the roles of airports in the network. Whereas knowledge on air transport network properties has been improved greatly, methods to find critical airports in the n...

Abstract Recent human dynamics research has unmasked astonishing statistical characteristics such as scaling behaviors in human daily activities. However, less is known about the general mechanism that governs the task-specific activities. In particular, whether scaling law exists in human activities under high pressure remains an open question. In...

The voice communication of air traffic controllers is critical to the operating safety and efficiency of an air traffic management system. Based on the previous human dynamics studies, air traffic controller's voice communication data, which were collected from Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Guiyang, are carefully analyzed. The use of detrended f...

Eye movements are important indicators of information seeking behavior, and provide an insight into information about interests, goals, plans and cognitive strategies. The understanding of eye movements is thus of great importance to study the behaviors of human who are responsible for the safety and efficiency of a complex system. In air traffic m...

This paper addresses an empirical analysis of air traffic controller’s activities using a human dynamics and complex systems approach. Recent studies on human dynamics show several empirical evidences that, different from common belief respecting random-based Poisson distributions, patterns of human activities fit into power law distribution with h...

The automation systems have been prompting the improvement of capability of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system. However, there remains substantial debate over the role of air traffic controller (ATCO), in particular, controller's activities that are closely related to the operation safety in both current ATM system and future ATM system. As a...

Recent reports on human dynamics have uncovered regular patterns of human communication and other interactive activities that exhibit characteristics of heavy-tailed, power-law distributions instead of ever-belief Poisson-like random distributions. Motivated by these findings, we adopt a similar data-driven approach to investigate controller's comm...

A mathematical model is presented for sequencing departure flights in different airports within one terminal area. Both airport runways and departure routes are considered in the model. Practical issues that affect the implementation of the schedule are carried out by Constraint Position Shifting (CPS). Then a tabu search algorithm is developed and...

This is a study of aircraft scheduling problems based on the idea of CDM. Taking the interests of ATC, airlines, and airports into consideration, we propose a priority scheduling model that integrally schedules arrivals and departures using airlines' preferences. The model minimizes the total flights' weighted delay costs to find best landing times...

In this paper, we consider a scheduling problem for multi-airport departure flights. A mathematical model is presented for sequencing departure flights in different airports within one terminal area. Due to the traffic influences between airports, both airport runways and departure routes are considered in the model. Moreover, practical issues that...