CAREER- Co-Design of Networking and Decentralized Control to Enable Aerial Networks in an Uncertain Airspace

Airborne networking utilizes direct flight-to-to-flight communication for flexible information sharing, safe maneuvering, and coordination of time-critical missions. It is challenging because of the high mobility, stringent safety requirements, and uncertain airspace environment. This project uses a co-design approach that exploits the mutual benefits of networking and decentralized mobility control in an uncertain heterogeneous environment. The approach departs from the usual perspective that views physical mobility as communication constraints, communication as constraints for decentralized mobility control, and uncertain environment as constraints for both. Instead, we proactively exploits the constraints, uncertainty, and new structures with information to enable high-performance designs. The features of the co-design such as scalability, fast response, trackability, and robustness to uncertainty advance the core CPS science on decision-making for large-scale networks under uncertainty.
During the period of 2015-2016, the following results are achieved.
1. We developed a systematic scalable uncertainty evaluation method that breaks the curse of dimensionality. The method integrates MPCM and Orthogonal Fractional Factorial Design (OFFD) to maximally reduce the number of simulations from 22