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 Mr. Chris Brinton
Mosaic ATM is led by Mr. Chris Brinton, who is the President and a Principal Analyst. Mr. Brinton formed Mosaic ATM in 2004, with Dr. Stephen Atkins, to pursue advanced research, development, deployment, and commercialization opportunities in the air transportation industry using their extensive experience and expertise in aviation operations.
Mr. Brinton is an instrument-rated and commercially licensed pilot and has almost 20 years of experience in the research and development of advanced concepts and automation for Air Traffic Management (ATM). During his career, Mr. Brinton has led and performed analysis, concept development, software development, and field trials that have advanced the state of knowledge about the National Airspace System (NAS).
Background
At the beginning of his career, Mr. Brinton was a civil servant at the NASA Ames Research Center as the lead application architect on the Center-TRACON Automation System (CTAS). During this time, he led a complete re-architecture, producing the system design that continues to be used today. In addition, he designed and coded an optimizing arrival scheduling algorithm as part of the Traffic Management Advisor (TMA). Mr. Brinton also worked on-site at the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) gathering domain knowledge and supporting TMA shadow-mode operation. After leaving NASA, Mr. Brinton supported the FAA’s development of the Free Flight Phase 1 version of CTAS and led a team in the design and development of the Adaptation, Validation, and Analysis (AVA) tool to support the CTAS adaptation process, which continues to be useful today for the maintenance of CTAS adaptation.
Prior to founding Mosaic ATM, Mr. Brinton was a Vice President, and then the Chief Operating Officer, of Metron Aviation between 1999 and 2004. In this position, Mr. Brinton led the growth of the organization from 15 to 115 staff members and was responsible for a significant portion of the revenue of the company. Mr. Brinton established corporate goals, objectives and strategies, and instilled the corporate mission and vision throughout the organization. Through the significant growth of the Metron Aviation, Mr. Brinton facilitated and established a focus on leadership and communication in key management levels of the organization and throughout the staff. During the period of time that Mr. Brinton was at Metron Aviation, it was recognized as one of the foremost organizations in the Traffic Flow Management (TFM) field of the aviation industry.
He was the Principal Investigator for NASA’s development of the Surface Management System (SMS). Mr. Brinton led development, simulation, and field demonstration planning and conduct; accuracy and benefits analysis; and prototype deployment of SMS into air carrier facilities. Moreover, he was the principal designer of SMS surface modeling, resource management, and aircraft scheduling algorithms. He has led the development of SMS and Surface Decision Support System (SDSS) algorithms since the late 1990s when the first airport surface modeling algorithms were designed and developed by Mr. Brinton as a hybrid network event model.
Mr. Brinton has a strong business background, having led multiple start-up and small organizations through significant and successful growth periods. After beginning his career as a NASA civil servant, Mr. Brinton has held executive and managerial positions at a number of companies in the aviation consulting industry. As a Co-Founder, Director, and Vice President of Wyndemere Incorporated, Mr. Brinton led the growth of an aviation consulting and systems engineering practice from three people to 30 people over a period of four years. At the end of this period, Wyndemere Incorporated was named to Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest growing companies.
Education
Mr. Brinton received a Bachelor of Science and Engineering degree with Highest Honors in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
What He’s Doing Today
Mr. Brinton has been the Principal Investigator on FAA and NASA research studies related to airport surface traffic, air traffic complexity, the effects of Miles-in-Trail restrictions in the TFM system, dynamic resectorization, software design for ATM automation, measuring ATM concept benefits, and Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) concepts. He has contributed to the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) Enterprise Architecture IPT’s decomposition of the activities, roles, responsibilities, and information flow required for the conduct of air transportation operations. Mr. Brinton has also conducted research on Virtual air traffic control towers, taxi conformance monitoring, and computer vision and speech recognition applications to Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) operations in the NAS.
Mr. Brinton is the Program Manager for Mosaic ATM’s support to the FAA on the Surface Trajectory Based Operations (STBO) project. The FAA has established the STBO project in the Advanced Technology Development and Prototyping group of ATO-P to conduct research on airport surface trajectory-based operations. Achieving airport surface trajectory-based operations will require a series of advances in procedures, supporting automation systems, and collaboration between local ATC facilities and the flight operators. The STBO project, which supports the FAA Flight Plan Goals of increased efficiency, capacity, and safety, will demonstrate and publish requirements for a series of capabilities that build to the NextGen vision for surface trajectory-based operations. Examples include local data exchange, which will lead to the sharing of flight readiness information and collaboration that will enable pre-planned runway schedules integrated with airborne trajectory-based operations. Surface flow management will reduce surface engine operating times, resulting in fuel savings and reduced environmental impacts, and will lead to collaborative resource allocation and avoidance of surface gridlock. Digital taxi clearances will enable preplanned and coordinated airport surface trajectories and will lead to taxi conformance monitoring, which could reduce the risks of runway incursion and incorrect runway incidents.
Another significant effort led by Mr. Brinton is the creation of the Surface Operations Data Analysis and Adaptation (SODAA) tool, which stores airport surface and terminal area data. SODAA capabilities facilitate searching, visualizing, and analyzing airport surface and terminal area data, with the goal of improving understanding of airport surface and terminal area operations. SODAA was developed under funding from NASA through the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program. Development continues under a Phase III SBIR contract.
Mr. Brinton has led Mosaic ATM’s Dynamic Airspace project assessing the different concepts and classes for airspace in NextGen through the design of algorithms and the conduct of modeling and analysis. One of the fundamental research issues being addressed in the evaluation of different airspace concepts is the dependency between airspace allocation and flight routes. Through previous work, Mr. Brinton has already evaluated candidate airspace classes and performance metrics to use for the analysis and comparison of different airspace concepts. Analysis metrics that Mr. Brinton has implemented includes dynamic density, flight efficiency, frequency of airspace change, significance of change, and robustness to inaccuracies in predictions of demand and capacity.
 Dr. Stephen Atkins
Dr. Stephen Atkins is Vice President and a Principal Analyst. Dr. Atkins has more than 16 years of experience performing aviation and air traffic management (ATM) research and development. Dr. Atkins has extensive experience identifying opportunities for air transportation improvements, such as those enabled by new technologies; defining operational concepts; extracting the key research issues; and formulating research plans to address those issues. Dr. Atkins is a skilled analyst and project leader.
Dr. Atkins has conducted extensive field observations, including significant time observing in Airport Traffic Control (ATC) facilities and air carrier facilities. Dr. Atkins is a recognized expert on airport traffic management. Dr. Atkins also has considerable experience leading field trials and working with end users to refine concepts and prototype systems.
Background
At a time when almost all ATM research was focused on airborne phases of flight, Dr. Atkins began a research program at NASA to study the airport surface. As an Aerospace Engineer at NASA Ames Research Center, from 1998 to 2002, Dr. Atkins invented the Surface Management System (SMS) and led SMS research and development, including authoring operational concept documents, planning and conducting simulations and field demonstrations with FAA controllers, algorithm design, accuracy and benefits analysis, and prototype deployment at air carrier facilities. SMS was evaluated by FAA ATC specialists in NASA Future Flight Central simulations and at Memphis ATC Tower, TRACON, and Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) in “shadow mode” and an operational trial. SMS reached Technology Readiness Level 6, satisfied a major milestone of the FAA’s Operational Evolution Plan (OEP), and received a 2004 NASA Turning Goals Into Reality (TGIR) award. Dr. Atkins also received a TGIR award as part of the Collaborative Arrival Planning Research Team and NASA Group Achievement Awards as part of the SMS Development Team, Advanced Air Transportation Technologies (AATT) Project Team, and System Level Integrated Concept Development Team. Dr. Atkins received an Ames Honor Award for Best First Paper and a Technical Writing Award from the Air Traffic Control Association. While at NASA, Dr. Atkins also led NASA’s efforts and conducted research on the integration of arrival, surface, and departure traffic management, authoring papers on the topic.
Prior to co-founding Mosaic ATM, Dr. Atkins led a variety of ATM research projects and contributed to business development at Metron Aviation.
Education
Dr. Atkins received his Ph.D., S.M., and S.B. from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Atkins conducted his doctoral research on the temporal characteristics of information and decisions, in particular in the context of air transportation. He invented an approach to optimizing when to commit to a decision when delaying the decision reduces uncertainty and, therefore, increases the probability of making a good decision, but also reduces the potential benefit of a good decision and increases the cost of a bad decision and cost of information. When to execute an avoidance maneuver is an example, since the ability to accurately predict whether or not a conflict will occur increases as the decision is delayed, but the cost of executing a maneuver if needed increases. Dr. Atkins’ master’s research on control systems investigated an approach to adaptive, non-linear control through reinforcement learning. Dr. Atkins has authored and co-authored numerous technical papers.
What He’s Doing Today
Dr. Atkins contributes to and provides vision for most of Mosaic ATM’s projects. In particular, Dr. Atkins is currently working on Surface Trajectory Based Operations (STBO). The FAA has established the STBO project in the Advanced Technology Development and Prototyping group of ATO-P to conduct research on airport surface trajectory-based operations. Achieving airport surface trajectory-based operations will require a series of advances in procedures, supporting automation systems, and collaboration between local ATC facilities and the flight operators. The STBO project, which supports the FAA Flight Plan Goals of increased efficiency, capacity, and safety, will demonstrate and publish requirements for a series of capabilities that build to the NextGen vision for surface trajectory-based operations. Examples include local data exchange, which will lead to the sharing of flight readiness information and collaboration that will enable pre-planned runway schedules integrated with airborne trajectory-based operations. Surface flow management will reduce surface engine operating times, resulting in fuel savings and reduced environmental impacts, and will lead to collaborative resource allocation and avoidance of surface gridlock. Digital taxi clearances will enable preplanned and coordinated airport surface trajectories and will lead to taxi conformance monitoring, which could reduce the risks of runway incursion and incorrect runway incidents.
Dr. Atkins is developing the Concept of Use for Surface Trajectory Based Operations for the FAA. He previously lead the FAA’s Surface Decision Support System (SDSS) activities at SDF, which included requirements development, continued SMS improvements including significant new features, and research on a standardized, two-way interface between SDSS and flight operators. UPS has integrated SMS into their systems and operations, and Mosaic ATM provides 24x7 support for UPS’ use of SMS.
In addition to STBO, Dr. Atkins is working on Metroplex projects. A metroplex phenomenon is an interaction between two or more operations at closely-spaced airports. Mosaic ATM is studying examples of metroplex phenomena is to identify the types of interactions that occur and also the types of approaches currently used to manage those interactions. A combination of traffic demand growth, Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) technologies and operational concepts, and increased utilization of regional airports is expected to increase the occurrence and severity of coupling between operations at proximate airports. Without understanding the nature of metroplexes and developing solutions that provide efficient coordination of operations between closely-spaced airports, the use of NextGen technologies and distribution of demand to regional airports may provide little increase in the overall metroplex capacity.
Another of Dr. Atkins’ projects is Airport Ground Resource Planning (AGRP), which involves studying the application of air carrier pre-departure data for improving departure demand forecasts used in traffic management decisions, data mining of airport surveillance data to understand taxi characteristics, planning algorithms to optimize how flight operators use their ground resources, and a thin-client architecture that could be used to support frequent subject matter expert (SME) evaluations of decision support tool prototypes.
Dr. Atkins has also contributed to the development of the Surface Operations Data Analysis and Adaptation (SODAA) tool, including defining derived data elements and authoring the user’s guide. He has used SODAA for several studies. Dr. Atkins previously designed the Traffic Management Advisor (TMA) model for ACES.
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