North Atlantic Aircraft Trajectory Optimization

Olga Rodionova (1, 2) , Mohammed Sbihi (1) , Daniel Delahaye (1) , Marcel Mongeau (1)

1 MAIAA - ENAC - Laboratoire de Mathématiques Appliquées, Informatique et Automatique pour l'Aérien
2 IMT - Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse UMR5219

North Atlantic oceanic airspace accommodates air traffic between North America and Europe. Radar-based surveillance is not applicable in this vast and highly congested airspace. For conflict-free flight progress, the organized track system is established in the North Atlantic and flights are prescribed to follow predefined oceanic tracks. Rerouting of aircraft from one track to another is very rarely applied because of large separation standards. As a result, aircraft often follow routes that are not optimal in view of their departure and destination points. This leads to an increase in aircraft cruising time and congestion level in continental airspace at input and output. Implementing new technologies and airborne-based control procedures will enable a significant decrease in the present separation standards and improvement of the traffic situation in the North Atlantic. The aim of the present study is to show the benefits that can be expected from such a reduction of separation standards. Optimal conflict-free trajectories are constructed for several flight sets based on the new proposed separation standards, with respect to the flight input data and oceanic winds. This paper introduces a mathematical model, proposes an optimization formulation of the problem, constructs two test problems based on real air-traffic data, and presents very encouraging results of simulations for these data.

Mots clés: Aircraft trajectory optimization; North Atlantic oceanic airspace; genetic algorithm (GA); organized track system (OTS); waypoints

Domaines: Optimisation et contrôle [math.OC]

Olga Rodionova, Mohammed Sbihi, Daniel Delahaye, Marcel Mongeau. North Atlantic Aircraft Trajectory Optimization. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2014, 15 (5), pp 2202-2212. ⟨10.1109/TITS.2014.2312315⟩. ⟨hal-00981337⟩