• John-Paul Clarke
  • Associate Professor

Contact Information

Office: ESM 104
Phone: 404.385.7206
Fax: 404.894.2760
  • jp.clarke@aerospace.gatech.edu

Education

  • S.B., Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1991, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • S.M., Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1992, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Sc.D., Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1997, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Biography

John-Paul Clarke is an associate professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering and director of the Air Transportation Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). He was the first director of the Partnership for AiR Transportation Noise and Emissions Research (PARTNER), and has, since coming to Georgia Tech, become the co-principal investigator of PARTNER at Georgia Tech. He is also an active researcher in the National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR). Prof. Clarke was a faculty member at MIT prior to moving to Georgia Tech. He has also been a researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a visiting scholar at the Boeing Company. His research and teaching address issues of optimization and robustness in aircraft and airline operations, air traffic management and the environmental impact of aviation. He is noted, among other things, for developing noise abatement procedures for busy terminal areas, airline schedules that are robust to disruptions, and air transportation simulation and optimization tools. Dr. Clarke is a member of the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies (AGIFORS), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the Institute of Navigation (ION), the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS), and Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. He is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA (elected in 2004) and was selected as an AIAA distinguished lecturer in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005.

Research

Optimization of operations involving large scale systems, with specialization as follows:
  • Maximizing the efficiency of the global air transportation system while simultaneously minimizing its adverse societal impact (including the environment)
  • Air traffic control and traffic flow management
  • Aircraft trajectory planning and control
  • Development of new approaches to large scale system optimization and control, system analysis and design, and the novel application of existing methodologies

Honors and Distinctions

  • Associate Fellow of the AIAA
  • FAA Excellence in Aviation Award, 2003
  • AGIFORS Award for Most Innovative Idea in Operations Control (2002, 2005, 2006)
  • AIAA/AAAE/ACC Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award, 1999

Selected Publications

  • “Continuous Descent Approach: Design and Flight Test for Louisville International Airport,” (with N. T. Ho, L. Ren, J. A. Brown, K. R. Elmer, K.-O. Tong, and J. K. Wat). AIAA Journal of Aircraft, Vol. 41, No. 5, pp. 1054-1066, September-October 2004.
  • “Evaluation of Improved Pushback Forecasts Derived from Airline Ground Operations Data,” (with F. Carr, G. Theis, and E. Feron). AIAA Journal of Aerospace Computing, Information, and Communication, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 25-43, January 2004.
  • “Investments Under Uncertainty in Air Transportation: A Real Options Perspective,” (with B. Miller). Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 61-74, Spring 2005.
  • “Planning for Robust Airline Operations: Optimizing Aircraft Routings and Flight Departure Times to Minimize Passenger Disruptions,” (with S. Lan and C. Barnhart). Transportation Science, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 15-28, January 2006.
  • “MEANS – The MIT Extensible Air Network Simulation,” (with T. Melconian, E. Bly, and F. Rabbani) SIMULATION: Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International, (to appear) 2006.