Professor Constantine Caramanis and colleagues at MIT received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study the National Air Transportation System (NATS) as an autonomously reconfigurable engineered system, enabled by cyber-infrastructure. The NATS is a core part of the national economy. Recent studies project that disturbance-induced congestion and delays will soon make the current system unstable, thus threatening to arrest growth and expansion. In short, the current system is unsustainable.

Dr. Caramanis’ research will develop new mathematical models and tools, cooperative and distributed algorithms and protocols to enable the NATS to be robust to unforeseen disturbance and uncertain events, through autonomous reconfigurability. This is accomplished through dynamic, distributed, iterative and optimization-based capacity allocation and scheduling mechanisms, complemented by dynamic pricing and collaborative arrangements between airlines.