ARCTIC AIR TRANSPORT AS INFORMATION AND COMPUTATION

  • P.I.: Massimiliano Zanin
  • Coordinator: Massimiliano Zanin
  • Start date: March 1, 2020
  • End date: Feb. 28, 2025

This project is an ERC Starting Grant of panel SH2, "Institutions, Values, Environment and Space". Air transport has by and large been studied as a transportation process, in which different elements, e.g. aircraft or passengers, move within the system. While intuitive, this approach entails several drawbacks, including the need for large-scale simulations, the reliance on real data, and the difficulty of extracting macro-scale conclusions from large quantities of micro- scale results. The lack of a better approach is in part responsible for our inability to fully understand delay propagation, one of the most important phenomena in air transport.

ARCTIC proposes an ambitious program to change the conceptual framework used to analyse air transport, inspired by the way the brain is studied in neuroscience. It is based on understanding air transport as an information processing system, in which the movement of aircraft is merely a vehicle for information transfer. Airports then become computational units, receiving information from their neighbours through inbound flights under the form of delays; processing it in a potentially non-linear way; and redistributing the result to the system as outbound delays. As already common in neuroscience, such computation can be made explicit by using a combination of information sciences and statistical physics techniques: from the detection of information movements through causality metrics, up to the representation of the resulting transfer structures through complex networks and their topological properties. The approach also entails important challenges, e.g. the definition of appropriate metrics or the translation of the obtained insights into implementable policies.
ARCTIC’s methodology will be used over the next five years to characterize and model delay propagation, as well as to limit its societal and economic impact.

Researchers

  • Massimiliano Zanin

    Massimiliano Zanin

Recent Publications

Identifiability of complex networks

Zanin, Massimiliano; Buldú, J.M.
Frontiers in Physics 11, (2023)

Augmenting Granger Causality through continuous ordinal patterns

Zanin, Massimiliano
Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation 128, 107606 (2023)

An overview of network structures and node importance in the global aviation system from the year 2011 to 2022

Zanin, Massimiliano; Wandelt, Sebastian
Journal of the Air Transport Research Society 1, 63-80 (2023)

Randomized phase II clinical trial of ruxolitinib plus simvastatin in COVID19 clinical outcome and cytokine evolution

Garcia-Donas, Jesus; [...]; Zanin, Massimiliano; et al.
Frontiers in Immunology 14, 1156603 (2023)

Markov-modulated model for landing flow dynamics: An ordinal analysis validation

Olivares, Felipe; Zunino, Luciano; Zanin, Massimiliano
Chaos: an interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science 33, 033142(1-12) (2023)

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