Syed Arbab Mohd Shihab

2papers

2 Papers

31.1NAMay 1
Reliability, Robustness, and Resilience Modeling for Surveillance System in Advanced Air Mobility Operations

Esrat Farhana Dulia, Caleb Adams, Syed Arbab Mohd Shihab et al.

Ensuring the safe and efficient operation of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) in low-altitude airspace requires a reliable, robust, and resilient surveillance system capable of continuously detecting, identifying, and tracking aircraft under both normal and off-nominal conditions. To address this need, this study develops a comprehensive 3R modeling framework, reliability, robustness, and resilience, for the Surveillance for Advanced Air Mobility (SAM) system, with a focus on the optimal design and operation of a multi-type sensor network. Under normal operating conditions, the reliability model determines the baseline sensor types, quantities, and locations required to satisfy surveillance coverage and detection requirements. To address external perturbations, such as adverse weather conditions or sudden increases in AAM traffic demand, the robustness model identifies additional sensor requirements needed to maintain system performance. Furthermore, for surveillance outages caused by primary sensor failures, the resiliency model develops backup sensor deployment and dispatch strategies to provide temporary surveillance coverage, minimize operational disruptions, and support the safe continuation of AAM operations.

AIFeb 18, 2019
Autonomous Airline Revenue Management: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to Seat Inventory Control and Overbooking

Syed Arbab Mohd Shihab, Caleb Logemann, Deepak-George Thomas et al.

Revenue management can enable airline corporations to maximize the revenue generated from each scheduled flight departing in their transportation network by means of finding the optimal policies for differential pricing, seat inventory control and overbooking. As different demand segments in the market have different Willingness-To-Pay (WTP), airlines use differential pricing, booking restrictions, and service amenities to determine different fare classes or products targeted at each of these demand segments. Because seats are limited for each flight, airlines also need to allocate seats for each of these fare classes to prevent lower fare class passengers from displacing higher fare class ones and set overbooking limits in anticipation of cancellations and no-shows such that revenue is maximized. Previous work addresses these problems using optimization techniques or classical Reinforcement Learning methods. This paper focuses on the latter problem - the seat inventory control problem - casting it as a Markov Decision Process to be able to find the optimal policy. Multiple fare classes, concurrent continuous arrival of passengers of different fare classes, overbooking and random cancellations that are independent of class have been considered in the model. We have addressed this problem using Deep Q-Learning with the goal of maximizing the reward for each flight departure. The implementation of this technique allows us to employ large continuous state space but also presents the potential opportunity to test on real time airline data. To generate data and train the agent, a basic air-travel market simulator was developed. The performance of the agent in different simulated market scenarios was compared against theoretically optimal solutions and was found to be nearly close to the expected optimal revenue.