The Air Traffic Control (ATC) system is responsible for safe air traffic operations of both commercial and general aviation within the nation's airspace. Even though the ATC has managed air traffic with a strong safety record over the past several decades, the system does suffer from the occasional serious accident. Due to the continuous growth of air traffic, airborne delays and ground holds have become common today and will increase rapidly in the near future unless there are changes to the equipment and structure of the current ATC. The pressure for changes in the ATC system originates from three primary sources: the need for improved safety and efficiency; the availability of new technology; and the desire to support the air traffic controllers. The current airspace called National Airspace System (NAS) has a rigid, centralized structure, and aircraft are required to follow predefined airways or instructions given by controllers. Due to recent advances in navigation and data communication technologies such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), and a new data link between aircraft and between aircraft and ground controllers known as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), it may be plausible in the near future for aircraft to fly their own trajectories instead of predefined paths in the NAS. The research topics include:

• Autonomous conflict detection and resolution: Algorithms can detect and resolve multiple (>3) aircraft (or mobile robots conflicts with provable safety. Proposed algorithms could be implemented on-board autopilot for real-time applications as well as ground command stations as an decision supporting tools.
  • Rule-Based Conflict Resolution for Mixed Airspace
• Pilot's intent inference and conformance monitoring: An algorithm can infer the pilot's intent from kinematic data such as an aircraft's position and velocity, and information about flight plan, Air Traffic Control regulations, and the
  environment. Since the algorithm provides descriptive information as well as kinematic information of an aircraft, it
  could increase situational awareness of pilots or ground controllers and thus could lead to safe air traffic operations in congested traffic environments. The algorithm could be useful for aircraft conformance monitoring to see if aircraft follow their pre-planned schedules.
• Airspace security monitoring and safety verification: Algorithms can detect potentially dangerous aircraft using the
  estimated behaviors of aircraft and the inferred pilot's intent, and thus alarm air traffic controllers or pilots to take necessary measures in time to prevent potential unsafe events. The algorithm could also be used for various military applications including airspace surveillance and multiple-aircraft tracking with capability of early warning.
• Safe interface/cockpit design: Algorithms can check and/or design a cockpit interface such that it guarantees safety through reachable set analysis and computation. Especially, for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) applications, current UAVs such as Predator are remotely piloted so that cockpit interface with increases situational awareness and guaranteed safety would be very important.
• Future airspace systems design: design the future airspace systems that can accommodate both the manned and unmanned aircraft in the same airspace and also safely integrate future commercial aircraft-like spacecraft (e.g. spaceship one) into the air traffic control system.