Abstract
Many operations in air transportation systems, such as flying an airplane or air traffic management, are performed by human following specific procedures. Standards of these operations are multifaceted depending on pilot, air traffic controller, weather, aircraft systems, or traffic conditions; there is a lack of agreeable terms to describe what is "deficient", though the definition of "safe" or "failure" is clear. However, to improve future operations, it is important to understand and characterize these normal operations. With the technological environment advances in air transportation systems, massive amounts of data are generated from multiple sources as operations occur. The development of analytic tools utilizing these data can significantly contribute to improve future operations. Deficiencies in operations can be identified by mining a large amount of operational data in post-event analysis; actual system behavior can be characterized for real time decision support.

In this talk, I will present several ongoing projects towards characterizing operations in air transportation systems based on large-scale operational data. The preliminary results show that the data-driven approach is effective to identify the actual behavior and complexity of pilot operations and air traffic networks, which are not captured by existing methods.

Biography
Lishuai Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). She received a Ph.D. and a M.Sc. in Air Transportation Systems from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received a B.Eng. in Aircraft Design and Engineering from Fudan University. Before joining CityU, she was a consultant at McKinsey & Company in San Francisco.