Air traffic management (ATM) research projects focus on enabling the safe and equitable use of airspace that can accommodate today’s commercial air transportation vehicles and small and large unmanned aircraft systems (UAS, or drones), as well as novel vehicles and airspace uses such as space traffic management, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxis and autonomous cargo vehicles.
This research also focuses on further researching, building and demonstrating NASA’s urban air mobility (UAM) concept, enabling software and system architectures modeled after NASA’s UAS traffic management (UTM) paradigm, and enabling the introduction of services responsible for airspace resource scheduling, separation, conflict detection and resolution, integration of weather and noise predictions, and digital transformation of the National Airspace System (NAS).
NAMS-2 staff support NASA R&D in air traffic management (ATM), which consists of research and software development, and support the objectives and missions of the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) project technology area, primarily supporting NASA researchers and engineers performing R&D.
Projects in this area may focus on:
- Research, development, integration, testing, demonstration and deployment through activities spanning initial concept development (technology readiness level (TRL) 1) and evaluation through limited simulations and testing through in-situ field tests at operational ATM facilities (TRL-7) or in operational field environments, often in collaboration with government and industry partners.
- Field testing and demonstrations.
Areas of expertise required for this work include aeronautical engineering, modeling and simulation, artificial intelligence, operations research, software engineering, system engineering, electrical engineering, machine learning and discrete and continuous control.