A Concept for Multi-Criteria Environmental Assessment of Aircraft Trajectories

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.

Digitalization: An Opportunity for Contributing to Sustainability From Knowledge Creation

“…In the operational field, the study of the optimal trajectory has been broadly researched [69][70][71], in most of the cases linked to FCO. The FCO in the air transport sector is an old topic [72], and aside from the obvious business interests, sustainability is making it again a trending topic [73][74][75][76]. (c)…”

Climate-Optimized Trajectories and Robust Mitigation Potential: Flying ATM4E

“…Within a simple framework the trade-off between the climate impact of CO 2 emissions 2 of 15 and contrails for a single flight were assessed [2,3]. More comprehensive studies showed the feasibility of climate-optimized trajectories with single day case studies in order to reduce total climate impact of aviation in the North Atlantic Flight corridor [4] and over Europe [5]. A more recent study focused on the mitigation of contrail effects when considering trade-offs in CO 2 [6].…”

Various aircraft routing options for air traffic simulation in the chemistry-climate model EMAC 2.53: AirTraf 2.0

“…AirTraf can take into account where and when aviation emissions are released or contrails form. The road map for our overall study has been shown elsewhere (Grewe et al, 2017b;Matthes et al, 2017). This paper presents a technical description of AirTraf (version 2.0).…”