Research Topics in Aerospace / Virtual and Remote Control Tower

After theresearch focus of the Inst. of Fligt Guidance had turned more and more awayfrom aircraft towards air traffic, the research in measurement technologiesgradually ended and in 1999 the editor joined the Human Factors Department wherehe started the "Virtual Tower" concept study (2002-2004), after winning a firstprize within DLR's first "Visionary Projects" competition, endowed with an initialresearch grant. He was project leader of DLR's "Remote Airport Tower Operations"projects RApTOR (2005-2007) and RAiCe (Remote Airport Traffic Control Center,2008-2012). In 2010 he spent a research semester at NASA-Ames Advanced DisplaysLab.(working with Steve Ellis, author of the foreword and (co-) author of two bookchapters), preparing psychophysics experiments for Remote Towercharacterization. In 2011 the editor was again winner at the fifth DLR-VisionaryProjects competition. The proposal: "Extreme Events Prediction" received astarting grant that supported his growing interest in complex systems dynamics.In 2014 he joined the Controller Assistance department where he is currently responsiblefor DLR's contribution to the European collaborative project "Robust-ATM" (2013- 2016) that addresses air traffic optimization under disturbance usingadvanced mathematical methods. His research interest had always aninterdisciplinary touch and is presently focused on nonlinear dynamics andmodeling of diverse complex systems including human perception (two recentjournal papers in "Biological Cybernetics" and "Cognitive Processing") and airtraffic management under external stochastic disturbance. He is (co-) author ofca. 120 conference and journal papers and 17 patents. The Remote Tower patentwas recently licensed to a company for commercialisation, and it describes thebasics of an increasing number of installations worldwide, presently underoperational validation.