Objective: Modern air travel faces an array of economic, environmental, and technological factors with the potential to disrupt the status quo. In order to quantify this, Pratt & Whitney tasked our team with the development of a software package able to model, simulate, and forecast the impact of these disruptive factors on commercial aviation.

By developing surrogate models, a probabilistic framework was developed, allowing the user to configure a range of future scenarios, altering factors such as technological improvement k-factors (e.g. jet engine performance), economic constraints such as fuel and energy prices, and changing demographic factors like population distribution and proximity to transport hubs.

By simulating these user-configured scenarios, a range of transportation modes were analyzed to provide probability distributions for key output metrics. These metrics – including mean travel time, projected ticket prices, infrastructure cost, total costs per distance and time – were used to quantify the overall economic impact.

Contribution:

Lead Software Developer

• Led development of a probabilistic software framework for projection of disruptive technology impact, with respect to commercial aviation

• Individually developed graphical user interface allowing custom user-configured simulations, and graphical analysis of results, with particular focus on technological and economic outcomes

• Presented findings and associated software environment to Pratt & Whitney executives at headquarters in Hartford, CT

Skills:

• Software development (Python)

• Interpreting industry customer requirements and providing deliverable software to meet these needs 

• GUI development

• Probabilistic modeling and simulation, particularly with respect to economic factors and transportation infrastructure

• Presentation and communication

Takeaways:

• This project gave me a key understanding of the interplay between technical development and the overarching customer-driven needs and economic factors that drive a project

• Developed my knowledge of probabilistic modeling; including surrogate models, Brownian motion, and Monte Carlo simulations

• Gave me the opportunity to work closely with a leading industry sponsor, and present the findings to company executives - developing teamwork and professional communication skills