Multi-Objective Aircraft Robust Trajectory Optimization Considering Various Predictability Metrics Under Uncertain Wind

Abstract

Trajectory uncertainty presents a major challenge for air traffic management. In order to improving the predictability of flights to facilitate air traffic management while also considering the economic benefits of airlines, in this paper, a trajectory multi-objective optimization method based on robust optimal control with flexible chosen horizontal route is proposed. Both the trajectory predictability and trajectory economic cost are taken as the optimization objectives. The method takes the ensemble weather forecast data as input to consider the impact of wind uncertainty on trajectory operation. To consider the accumulated predictability of arrival time at important sampling points throughout the entire trajectory and the impacts of increased predictability on the passed through sectors with different busyness levels, the concept of robustness coefficient based on sector busyness weighting is proposed and new trajectory predictability objective functions are established. A scenario from Hong Kong to Amsterdam is constructed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm. The results show that the proposed method can improve the predictability of the arrival time at the destination by 67.30% when compared with the initial flight plan, and can further improve the accumulated predictability for the entire trajectory predictability by 21.30% using the entire trajectory predictability metric as the objective. The robustness coefficient’s effect on improving the arrival time predictability for busy sectors traversed by the trajectory without bringing unacceptable costs to the trajectory predictability in other sectors is also verified. By the experiments results, we can draw the conclusions that the proposed method can obtain wind optimized trajectory with both economy efficiency and improved predictability.

Keywords

• Air traffic management
• robust optimal control
• trajectory optimization
• high-altitude wind
• ensemble prediction system