News that Slovakia’s Transport Authority recently certified a vehicle that transforms from personal car to private plane in minutes for use by that country’s commuters and aviation enthusiasts illustrates how the options for moving people and material around are growing.
The Klein Vision company of Slovakia promotes its AirCar as a dual-mode vehicle that can go from road to air operations in less than three minutes and is now focusing on production and marketing of it.
There have been two air-and-road vehicles (Airphibian and Aerocar) certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and its predecessor Civil Aeronautics Administration in the 20th Century, but neither vehicle progressed to the mass market.
While local traffic reports won't be updating airborne conditions for commuters anytime soon, the trend is clear. Increased use of a variety of low and medium altitude aircraft, such as drones and piloted vehicles like the $92,000, single-seat Jetson One from Jetson Aero, as well as automated vehicles of all types, flying or not, is creating a need for discovering how to most efficiently manage existing transportation resources and plan for accommodating what's next.
Meeting that transportation research requirement is a large part of what the University of South Florida Smart Urban Mobility Laboratory (USF SUM) does. The lab undertakes projects that examine mobility-related issues from the ground up, ranging from shared micromobility and shared automated vehicles to using machine language to manage advanced air mobility (AAM) and promote airspace safety by planning conflict-free trajectories for future high density urban air mobility (UAM) operations.
Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Yu Zhang is the USF SUM Lab’s director and she says applying operations research and artificial intelligence/machine learning has worked well for projects ranging from rebalancing dockless bikeshare programs, to developing automated air traffic management systems for the next generation of integrated airspace filled with different sized piloted and unpiloted aerial vehicles transporting goods and passengers.
“First of all, to understand the transportation problem we ask, what is it from our professional knowledge? Then we communicate in discussions with related stakeholders to understand their needs and understand where the problems are.”
Zhang and the SUM Lab researchers not only use quantitative techniques but also qualitative ones, such as employing surveys of transportation users and then applying state-of-the-art analytical methods to gain useful insights for problems across a variety of applications.
“The focus of my lab, Smart Urban Mobility, is to apply mathematical programming, machine learning, and simulation to study the transportation network and then to come up with the solutions to improve the operational efficiency and sustainability and equity of the transportation systems.”
Areas of research listed on the SUM Lab website are Advanced Aerial Mobility, Micromobility and Shared Automated Vehicles, Air Transport Management, and Transportation Resilience.
Among the funded research projects the SUM Lab has been involved in is a $7 million award from the U.S. Department of Transportation to establish a Tier 1 University Transportation Center that pursues research and innovation to support sustainable mobility of people and goods while preserving the environment and improving community health. Zhang was also the principal investigator for about $750,000 Florida Department of Transportation awards to develop a Florida Airport Sustainability Tracking/Monitoring System, forecast Florida aviation activity, and analyze future roadway options for the Tampa Bay area. Other research projects supported by the FAA Nextgen Office have examined impacts of convective weather on flight operations and ensuring equity in access to transportation resources.
According to Zhang, who also serves as an affiliated faculty member of USF’s Center for Urban Transportation Research, accomplishing the work that the SUM Lab is responsible for requires a diverse set of skills from the team members.
“We have a team of PhD students at different levels and we also have master’s students, not only just from our Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, but they could come from the business school, or the Industrial and Management Systems Engineering Department, so I will recruit the students with the proper skills to join the research team and work together.”
Zhang, who is president of the Tampa Bay chapter of WTS-International (formerly Women’s Transportation Seminar), also contributes significantly to educating and mentoring women students and encourages them entering into transportation professional fields, such as academia, government agencies and private sector. Zhang also plays other leadership roles in professional organizations, such as serving as the Committee Chair of the TRB Airfield and Airspace Performance standing committee (AV060), and as associate editor for a couple of highly-ranked transportation journals.
Zhang earned MS and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. From the San Francisco Bay area to the Tampa Bay area, Zhang’s continuing her enthusiasm of studying challenging transportation problems and cultivating the future transportation workforce.
“The young generation is lucky to be in an era with rapid changes of technologies. There are lots of potential and possibilities in transportation and beyond,” says Zhang, who will be hosting the 10th International Conference on Research in Air Transportation (ICRAT) on June 19-23, 2022 at USF’s Tampa campus, which is an excellent forum for young researchers within air transportation to share their work, expand their professional network, and gain new knowledge and inspiration.