Courses

AEROSP 740 - Air Transportation Systems

Next offered: Fall 2023, Tues/Thurs 4:30-6 pm, G906 COOL 

Are you: (a) Stuck at Detroit Airport, wondering why your flight's delayed? (b) Trying to book your flight for {vacation, family, etc.}, wondering why fares are the way they are? (c) Curious about why airlines decide to fly some city-pairs, but not others? (d) Wondering if drone package deliveries will ever become reality?

If those questions have ever crossed your mind, you might be interested in this course!

Course description: The air transportation system is a canonical example of a capacity-constrained, societal-scale infrastructure; it couples a cyber-physical network with a socio-technical one, with an overarching goal of safe and efficient movement of people and goods through the skies. In this course, students will be given a technical introduction to and overview of the critical components comprising the air transportation system. This course is organized into four modules:

1. Airlines – topics include airline business models, schedule development, fleet/crew assignment models, airline revenue management, as well as flight dispatching and irregular operations.

2. Airports – topics include airport capacity and planning, taxiway and runway design, tactical and strategic demand management, and passenger terminal buildings.

3. Airspace system – topics include air traffic control, deterministic and stochastic air traffic flow management, Collaborative Decision-Making, and air navigation service provider initiatives such as FAA NextGen and Eurocontrol SESAR.

4. Other and emerging users – topics include air cargo operations, drones/UAS, Advanced Aerial Mobility (AAM), and UAS traffic management (UTM). Other advanced topics related to air transportation systems may be covered, depending on student interest.

Audience and prereqs: Given the inherently interdisciplinary perspectives in air transportation, this course may be of interest to students in Aero, IOE, CEE, ME, as well as city/urban planning (Taubman) and business (Ross), who are interested in learning about a fascinating transportation system, and/or applications of methods found in operations research, network science, statistics, and economics. In terms of pre-reqs, optimization (e.g., IOE 310, IOE 410), linear algebra (e.g., MATH 217), and familiarity with a programming language such as MATLAB, Python, R/RStudio will all be helpful; or permission of the instructor.

Check out the course flyer and tentative syllabus below (may be slightly outdated; please reach out to Max for more recent versions). Questions/want more info about the class? Please reach out to Max at maxzli@umich.edu.

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