Deconflicted Air-Traffic Planning With Speed-Dependent Fuel-Consumption Formulation

Abstract

This paper discusses a unique formulation for the en-route flight planning problem in a constrained airspace with the objective to minimize costs incurred from earliness, lateness, and fuel-consumption, and to ensure flight safety. Mid-air conflict and collision avoidance, and also minimum separation distance between aircraft and speed-dependent fuel-consumption-rate, are explicitly formulated. A 3D mesh network consisting of waypoints is used to provide alternative routing options for aircraft. The formulation of fuel-consumption-rate as a function of speed as part of the air-traffic planning (ATP) problem is unique in the literature. Moreover, this paper is the first attempt to model the mid-air conflict and collision avoidance as part of the ATP problem. In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the mathematical model, test instances were generated and solved by three different solution strategies. The proposed centralized solution strategy can optimally solve small size instances, similar to the air-traffic around airports to help air-traffic control authorities to manage arrival and departure sequences. Larger networks that include several airports can be solved by the proposed two sequential solution strategies (decentralized and hybrid solution strategies) to help air-traffic planning authorities to manage air-traffic safely and more economically.