The objective of this study is to estimate the airport capacity in the National Airspace System (NAS). Previous studies have focused on the airport capacity of large commercial airports. This research study estimates the runway capacity for more than two thousand airports in the NAS in order to understand future tradeoffs between air transportation demand and supply. The study presented in this report includes capacity estimates for general aviation and commercial airports. To estimate airport runway capacity, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Airfield Capacity Model (ACM) is used to assess the capacity at all candidate airports in a target airport set. This set includes all airports with potential Very Light Jet (VLJ) operations. The result of the study provides a broad view about the airport capacity in the future air transportation system, and could help decision makers with a modeling framework to identify congestion patterns in the system. Moreover, airport capacity is an important limiting factor in the growth of air transportation demand. The main motivation in our analyis is to include airport capacity constraints in forecasts of air transportation demand. The framework described in this report has been integrated into the Transportation Systems Analysis Model (TSAM). TSAM is a comprehensive intercity and multimode transportation planning tool to predict future air transportation demand. / Master of Science

Este trabalho apresenta um estudo focado na implementação de metas de manutenção funcional de pavimentos flexíveis aeroportuários de pistas de pouso e decolagem. Os aeroportos além de terem que desempenhar sua função conforme especificado pela Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil (ANAC), devem também preservar os pavimentos existentes em boas condições e promover segurança e conforto ao usuário. Ainda que haja critérios para definição de estratégias de manutenção dos pavimentos para as pistas de pouso e decolagem em outros países, é recomendado para o caso de aeroportos no Brasil a consideração de outros parâmetros relacionados a patologias e bacias transversais na superfície do pavimento. O objetivo desse trabalho é propor metas para uma manutenção efetiva para avaliação funcional de pavimentos aeroportuários flexíveis e com esse intuito, foram feitos levantamentos bibliográficos referentes a avaliação funcional, principais patologias encontradas em pavimentos flexíveis, avaliação de segurança em pavimentos aeroportuários, levantamento do índice de irregularidade internacional (IRI), principais índices de avaliação funcional e sistemas de gerenciamento de pavimentos utilizados no Brasil e em alguns países, e um estudo de caso para definição de parâmetros importantes adaptados à realidade brasileira para a criação de metas de manutenção. Para o estudo de campo foram realizados levantamentos nas pistas de pouso e decolagem de quatro aeroportos regionais no Estado de São Paulo. Os levantamentos realizados foram defeitos/patologias existentes na pista, irregularidade longitudinal e bacias transversais da pista. Para o levantamento da irregularidade longitudinal e bacias transversais na pista foi utilizado o equipamento Planógrafo AX 02, enquanto os defeitos foram levantados de acordo com a regulamentação americana do FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) para determinação do PCI (Pavement Condition Index) de acordo com o procedimento da norma ASTM D5340 (2012). / This paper presents a study focused on the implementation of functional maintenance targets for airport runway flexible pavement. Airports besides performing its function specified by the Brazilian National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC), should also preserve existing pavements in good condition and promote safety and comfort to the passenger. Although there are already criteria to define pavement maintenance strategies for runways in other countries, it is recommended for the Brazilian airports to consider other parameters related to pathologies and transversal basins on the pavement surface. This research consists on establishing an effective maintenance for functional evaluation of flexible runway pavement. Once established the purpose a literature review aiming to study the functional evaluation in flexible pavements was performed. The references also include main distresses found in asphalt pavements, safety evaluation on runway pavements, the International Roughness Index (IRI), the main functional evaluation indexes and Airport Pavement Management Systems in Brazil and in worldwide, and a case study to define important maintenance parameters adapted to Brazilian runways. The survey in loco was carried out to collect information about the runway state of four regional airports. This inspection detected irregularities along the runway and failure in the cross-section profile by the Planograph AX 02 equipament, and also revealed pavement defects pathologies according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations to determine the Pavement Condition Index (PCI), ASTM D5340 (2012).

Advances in hardware and pattern recognition techniques, along with the widespread utilization of remote sensing satellites, have urged the development of automatic target detection systems. Automatic detection of airports is particularly essential, due to the strategic importance of these targets. In this thesis, a detection method is proposed for airport runways, which is the most distinguishing element of an airport. This method, which operates on large optical satellite images, is composed of a segmentation process based on textural properties, and a runway shape detection stage. In the segmentation process, several local textural features are extracted including not only low level features such as mean, standard deviation of image intensity and gradient, but also Zernike Moments, Circular-Mellin Features, Haralick Features, as well as features involving Gabor Filters, Wavelets and Fourier Power Spectrum Analysis. Since the subset of the mentioned features, which have a role in the discrimination of airport runways from other structures and landforms, cannot be predicted, Adaboost learning algorithm is employed for both classification and determining the feature subset, due to its feature selector nature. By means of the features chosen in this way, a coarse representation of possible runway locations is obtained, as a result of the segmentation operation. Subsequently, the runway shape detection stage, based on a novel form of Hough Transform, is performed over the possible runway locations, in order to obtain final runway positions. The proposed algorithm is examined with experimental work using a comprehensive data set consisting of large and high resolution satellite images and successful results are achieved.

Este trabalho apresenta um estudo focado na implementação de metas de manutenção funcional de pavimentos flexíveis aeroportuários de pistas de pouso e decolagem. Os aeroportos além de terem que desempenhar sua função conforme especificado pela Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil (ANAC), devem também preservar os pavimentos existentes em boas condições e promover segurança e conforto ao usuário. Ainda que haja critérios para definição de estratégias de manutenção dos pavimentos para as pistas de pouso e decolagem em outros países, é recomendado para o caso de aeroportos no Brasil a consideração de outros parâmetros relacionados a patologias e bacias transversais na superfície do pavimento. O objetivo desse trabalho é propor metas para uma manutenção efetiva para avaliação funcional de pavimentos aeroportuários flexíveis e com esse intuito, foram feitos levantamentos bibliográficos referentes a avaliação funcional, principais patologias encontradas em pavimentos flexíveis, avaliação de segurança em pavimentos aeroportuários, levantamento do índice de irregularidade internacional (IRI), principais índices de avaliação funcional e sistemas de gerenciamento de pavimentos utilizados no Brasil e em alguns países, e um estudo de caso para definição de parâmetros importantes adaptados à realidade brasileira para a criação de metas de manutenção. Para o estudo de campo foram realizados levantamentos nas pistas de pouso e decolagem de quatro aeroportos regionais no Estado de São Paulo. Os levantamentos realizados foram defeitos/patologias existentes na pista, irregularidade longitudinal e bacias transversais da pista. Para o levantamento da irregularidade longitudinal e bacias transversais na pista foi utilizado o equipamento Planógrafo AX 02, enquanto os defeitos foram levantados de acordo com a regulamentação americana do FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) para determinação do PCI (Pavement Condition Index) de acordo com o procedimento da norma ASTM D5340 (2012). / This paper presents a study focused on the implementation of functional maintenance targets for airport runway flexible pavement. Airports besides performing its function specified by the Brazilian National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC), should also preserve existing pavements in good condition and promote safety and comfort to the passenger. Although there are already criteria to define pavement maintenance strategies for runways in other countries, it is recommended for the Brazilian airports to consider other parameters related to pathologies and transversal basins on the pavement surface. This research consists on establishing an effective maintenance for functional evaluation of flexible runway pavement. Once established the purpose a literature review aiming to study the functional evaluation in flexible pavements was performed. The references also include main distresses found in asphalt pavements, safety evaluation on runway pavements, the International Roughness Index (IRI), the main functional evaluation indexes and Airport Pavement Management Systems in Brazil and in worldwide, and a case study to define important maintenance parameters adapted to Brazilian runways. The survey in loco was carried out to collect information about the runway state of four regional airports. This inspection detected irregularities along the runway and failure in the cross-section profile by the Planograph AX 02 equipament, and also revealed pavement defects pathologies according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations to determine the Pavement Condition Index (PCI), ASTM D5340 (2012).

An expert system is useful when conventional programming techniques fall short of capturing human expert knowledge and making decisions using this information. In this study, we describe a framework for capturing expert knowledge under a decision tree form and this framework can be used for making decisions based on captured knowledge. The framework proposed in this study is generic and can be used to create domain specific expert systems for different problems. Features are created or processed by the nodes of decision tree and a final conclusion is reached for each feature. Framework supplies 3 types of nodes to construct a decision tree. First type is the decision node, which guides the search path with its answers. Second type is the operator node, which creates new features using the inputs. Last type of node is the end node, which corresponds to a conclusion about a feature. Once the nodes of the tree are developed, then user can interactively create the decision tree and run the supplied inference engine to collect the result on a specific problem. The framework proposed is experimented with two case studies / &quot / Airport Runway Detection in High Resolution Satellite Images&quot / and &quot / Urban Area Detection in High Resolution Satellite Images&quot / . In these studies linear features are used for structural decisions and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) features are used for testing existence of man made structures.