The award is sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and administered by Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) of the Transportation Research Board/National Academies. The award is being presented for successful completion during the upcoming academic year of his research paper on Benefit and Tradeoff Analysis of Continuous Descent Approach in Normal Traffic Conditions

Yi's PhD advisor is Assistant Professor Dr Dengfeng Sun. His research interest has been motivated by large scale networked problem in air traffic management (ATM), such as air traffic flow modeling and optimization, airport strategic operations and control. Most of the works involve mathematical modeling and simulation, exploring advanced optimization algorithms, programming and implementation. The air transportation is an interdisciplinary area in which classical control theory and novel research means are well combined. Taking advantage of the continuously increasing power of computing, the research is boosted with more informative analysis and new methodologies. By applying the state-of-the-art computer techniques, such as data mining and parallel computing, the complicated air traffic problem which is by nature a large scale multi-commodity network can be easily analyzed and solved in a more efficient way.