Abstract
Comprehensive assessment of the environmental aspects of flight movements is of increasing interest to the aviation sector as a potential input for developing sustainable aviation strategies that consider climate impact, air quality and noise issues simultaneously. However, comprehensive assessments of all three environmental aspects do not yet exist and are in particular not yet operational practice in flight planning. The purpose of this study is to present a methodology which allows to establish a multi-criteria environmental impact assessment directly in the flight planning process. The method expands a concept developed for climate optimisation of aircraft trajectories, by representing additionally air quality and noise impacts as additional criteria or dimensions, together with climate impact of aircraft trajectory. We present the mathematical framework for environmental assessment and optimisation of aircraft trajectories. In that context we present ideas on future implementation of such advanced meteorological services into air traffic management and trajectory planning by relying on environmental change functions (ECFs). These ECFs represent environmental impact due to changes in air quality, noise and climate impact. In a case study for Europe prototype ECFs are implemented and a performance assessment of aircraft trajectories is performed for a one-day traffic sample. For a single flight fuel-optimal versus climate-optimized trajectory solution is evaluated using prototypic ECFs and identifying mitigation potential. The ultimate goal of such a concept is to make available a comprehensive assessment framework for environmental performance of aircraft operations, by providing key performance indicators on climate impact, air quality and noise, as well as a tool for environmental optimisation of aircraft trajectories. This framework would allow studying and characterising changes in traffic flows due to environmental optimisation, as well as studying trade-offs between distinct strategic measures.
Highlights
Consideration of environmental aspects in en-route flight planning is generally not operational practice apart from the economic goal to minimise fuel use and to reduce CO2 emissions
This paper presents overall concept for a multi-criteria environmental assessment framework relying on environmental change functions (ECFs), as is currently under development in the European project ATM4E which is part of Exploratory Research within SESAR2020 research programme
We present a case study for a traffic sample over Europe which is applied on a candidate day using real weather conditions
Summary
Consideration of environmental aspects in en-route flight planning is generally not operational practice apart from the economic goal to minimise fuel use and to reduce CO2 emissions. Current daily operational flight planning has no information on environmental impacts of cruise emissions and a trajectory optimisation based on a climate impact assessment is not performed. The objective of this paper is (1) to present a concept for multi-criteria environmental assessment of aircraft trajectories, which relies on a set of environmental change functions (ECFs). These ECFs represent environmental impact of an aviation emission due to changes in air quality, noise and climate impact. (2) We introduce meteorological (MET) data products which represent environmental impact at given location and time, so called environmental change functions, which we consider as advanced meteorological information which should be made available via ATM information infrastructure. Individual criteria of environmental performance can be considered as distinct dimensions in an optimisation problem, which is why we use the term multi-dimensional environmental assessment
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