Laboratory for Air Transportation,
Infrastructure, and Connected Environments (LATTICE)
Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

The Laboratory for Air Transportation, Infrastructure, and Connected Environments (LATTICE) is focused on identifying and addressing research problems that contribute towards a safer, more efficient, and more resilient air transportation system and other societal-scale infrastructures.

Examples of research projects and impacts include:

• Advanced air traffic control and air traffic management concepts to reduce delays and passenger disruptions;

• Novel airspace and air traffic management models to integrate future airspace users such as Urban and Advanced Air Mobility;

• Autonomy and optimization under uncertainty for air transportation and logistics applications;

• ... and more!

Learn more about the Research, Publications, People, and Lab Values at LATTICE.

Upcoming

• Best Paper Award (Human Performance Track) for the paper "CHATATC: Large Language Model-Driven Conversational Agents for Supporting Strategic Air Traffic Flow Management," presented by Sinan Abdulhak at ICRAT 2024! Joint work with Wayne Hubbard and Dr. Karthik Gopalakrishnan. 

• Several new publications accepted:

  • New journal papers in Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment; Sustainability; and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

  • New conference papers in Conference in Emerging Technologies in Transportation Systems (TRC-30); 2024 International Workshop on ATM/CNS (IWAC); and 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum.

• Max will attend the 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting in October 2024.

  • Max serves as the Chair of the INFORMS Aviation Applications Section (AAS) Best Paper Award Committee.

• Max will attend the 34th Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS) in September 2024.

  • Max will serve as Session Chairs for AAM 2 (Airspace Integration) and AAM 3 (Vertiports and Infrastructure)

  • 2 papers will be presented (see Publications).  

• Max is serving as an invited panel member on two Airport Cooperative Research Project (ACRP) projects (ACRP 06-10, and ACRP 10-35). ACRP is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, under the Transportation Research Board (TRB).

  • Max served as an invited panel member on ACRP 01-50, completed in January 2024.

Past

• July 2024: Max attended AIAA ASCEND and AIAA AVIATION Forum.

  • Max served as Session Chairs for Operational Impacts and Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Advancements.

  • 5 papers presented (see Publications) by Michael Peng, Haochen Wu, Angel Lin, Nattanan Wongprapinkul, Michael Stevens, and Aria Olson. 

• July 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at the pre-conference workshop for the 25th International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory.

• July 2024: Max, Haochen, and Sinan attended the 11th International Conference on Research in Air Transportation. 

  • Max served as Session Chairs for System Performance and a Doctoral Symposium session.

  • 4 papers (see Publications) presented by Haochen Wu and Sinan Abdulhak.

• May 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, hosted by the Air Traffic Control Systems Group.

• May 2024: Max participated in a Technical Exchange Meeting at the University of Westminster, hosted by the Centre for ATM Research.

• May 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, hosted by Fluid Mechanics Group, Engineering Mechanics.

• May 2024: Max gave the Keynote at the DATS Workshop on Digital Air Traffic Services (DATS 2024).

• April 2024: Max attended the 3rd ICAO Global Implementation Support Symposium (ICAO GISS).

• April 2024: Max presented at the 24th AIAA-IEEE Integrated Communications, Navigation and Surveillance (ICNS) Conference on distributionally robust optimization for air traffic management.

  • Max served as Track Co-Chair and Session Chair for Operational Efficiency.

• April 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, hosted by the Department of City and Regional Planning.

• April 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at Wayne State University, hosted by the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

• March 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at the US-Japan Workshop Towards Sustainable Air Transportation, hosted by the University of Tokyo.

• March 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, hosted by the Department of Mechnical and Aerospace Engineering.

• March 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at City University of Hong Kong, hosted by the School of Data Science.

• March 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, hosted by the Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering.

• March 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at Singapore Management University, hosted by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) M3S Program.

• March 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at National University of Singapore, hosted by The Centre for Transportation Research (CTR) and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

• March 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at Nanyang Technological University, hosted by the Air Traffic Management Research Institute.

• March 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at Singapore University of Technology and Design, hosted by the Aviation Studies Institute.

• February 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at NASA Langley Research Center.

• February 2024: Max gave an invited seminar at the University of Waterloo, hosted by the Department of Management Science and Engineering, Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute, and the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics.

• January 2024: Three papers presented at the 2024 AIAA SciTech Forum:

  • "Exploration-exploitation guided drone dispatch strategies in uncertain environments," (joint work with Sihang Wei, Soham S. Phanse, Teja Koduru, Minghao Chen, and Derrick W. Yeo), presented by Soham in session UAS-05.

  • "NAS traffic flow management decision-making capability with network-wide resilience metrics," (joint work with Lesley A. Weitz, Adam J. Frewin, Lee Ellis, Roland C. Sgorcea, Yong Park, and Christine P. Taylor), presented by Lesley in session MST-04.

  • "Autonomous orbital slot maintenance with impulsive maneuvers and reinforcement learning," (joint work with Yutong Cheng and Oliver Jia-Richards), presented by Yutong in session OPS-02.

• January 2024: Max spoke at the HUB at 2024 AIAA SciTech Forum on blending and integrating research communities around Advanced Air Mobility's role in multimodal transportation and total mobility.

• January 2024: Max attended the Transportation Research Board 103rd Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. 

  • Max served as the Lectern Chair for the lectern session on Top Research in Airfield and Airspace Performance.

  • Max co-organized the session on Small Community Response to Air Service Development Trends -- Ensuring Resilience with Innovative Aviation Solutions and Other Transportation Modes.

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