On the 1st of December, the Aerospace System Design Laboratory (ASDL) hosted the Fall 2023 Smart City Workshop in its Collaborative Visualization Environment facility. The workshop explored urban design and systems engineering methods toward digital twin based on use cases around Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Aerotropolis Atlanta as a living laboratory for research.

The vision driving the workshop presentations is the post Covid-19 airport and Aerotropolis to be a healthy, safe, green, accessible, connected, resilient and socially inclusive urban environment. The program addressed topics around this vision: Urban Air and Ground Mobility, Master Planning and Digital Twin, and Vertiport Architecting and Design. Presentations from the students in the course included:

 

 

In her welcoming remarks, Georgia Tech’s Dean of the College of Design Dr. Ellen Bassett noted, “It’s not in many places in the U.S. that you could really have planning, design and construction students sitting with aerospace students thinking about something as important as the Atlanta airport.”

The workshop was organized by ASDL (School of Aerospace Engineering), the Eco Urban Lab, School of City & Regional Planning, and the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, along with Aerotropolis Atlanta Alliance, Inc..

This workshop is part of a jointly taught course between the three schools as an effort to build an interdisciplinary collaboration nexus with industry, government, and academia to address environment and societal issues in future planning and design of Atlanta’s Airport City (Aerotropolis). The launch of this partnership was motivated by Georgia Tech’s leadership in Smart Cities and Connected Communities and responded to the needs of ATL Airport Community Improvement Districts (AACIDs). Shannon James, President and CEO of the Aerotropolis Atlanta Alliance, commented that the presentations during the workshop and the next steps identified will be useful to the work of his organization. He noted that Aerotropolis will use the research and data to help inform their decisions.

Introduced in the Fall of 2020, the Smart City course has been attracting a growing number of city planning, architecture, GIS modeling, master planning, aerospace engineering, systems architecting, and computer science students. Students work together in multidisciplinary teams to formulate ideas and digital engineering solutions on sustainable mobility, space utilization and technology integration for the Aerotropolis of the future. Modeled after ASDL’s Grand Challenges, students present their work to a panel comprised of industry and government affiliates, who represent stakeholder interests within the Atlanta Aerotropolis. The course is taught by Regents’ Professor and ASDL Director Dr. Dimitri Mavris and Professor of City & Regional Planning and Architecture and Eco Urban Lab Director Dr. Perry Yang with support from ASDL Senior Research Engineer Dr. Michael Balchanos.

Mavris explained, “For the last three or four years we have been doing these joint activities to bring more people into the fold. The Aerotropolis is the latest one of those, and in the future, we are also trying to take this into colonization and CIS lunar activities, and then a lunar base. So, there are a lot of interesting areas of collaboration ahead.”