North Atlantic aircraft trajectory optimization

• Main Authors: Olga Rodionova, Mohamed Sbihi, Daniel Delahaye, Marcel Mongeau
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.635.1948; http://hal-enac.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/98/13/37/PDF/Rodionova_IEEETITS2014.pdf

North Atlantic oceanic airspace accommodates air traffic between North America and Europe. Radar-based surveillance is not applica-ble in this vast and highly congested airspace. For conflict-free flight progress, the Organized Track System is established in North Atlantic, and flights are prescribed to follow pre-defined oceanic tracks. Re-routing of aircraft from one track to another is very rarely applied because of large separation standards. As a result, aircraft often fol-low routes that are not optimal in view of their departure and desti-nation points. This leads to an increase in aircraft cruising time and congestion level in continental airspace at input and output. Imple-menting new technologies and airborne-based control procedures will enable significant decrease in the present separation standards and improvement of the traffic situation in 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; it proposes an optimization formulation of the problem; it constructs two test problems based on real air-traffic data, and it presents very encouraging results of simulations for these data. ∗Manuscript received; revised