Operating cost sensitivity to required time of arrival commands to ensure separation in optimal aircraft 4D trajectories

Abstract

Trajectory optimisation has shown good potential to reduce environmental impact in aviation. However, a recurring problem is the loss in airspace capacity that fuel optimal procedures pose, usually overcome with speed, altitude or heading advisories that lead to more costly trajectories. This paper aims at the quantification in terms of fuel and time consumption of implementing suboptimal trajectories in a 4D trajectory context that use required times of arrival at specific navigation fixes. A case study is presented by simulating conflicting Airbus A320 departures from two major airports in Catalonia. It is shown how requiring an aircraft to arrive at a waypoint early or late leads to increased fuel burn. In addition, the efficiency of such methods to resolve air traffic conflicts is studied in terms of both fuel burn and resulting aircraft separations. Finally, various scenarios are studied reflecting various airline preferences with regards to cost and fuel burn, as well as different route and conflict geometries for a broader scope of study.

Conflict-Free Trajectory Optimization with Target Tracking and Conformance Monitoring

“…Ref. [5] concludes that this coordinated distributed strategy can render very efficient results. through the said future collaboration frameworks.…”

“…as the authors presented in Ref. [5]; whereas in the noncooperative case the trajectory prediction could only rely on current and historical data to produce the immediate future states (these cases will be further studied in future work). Additionally, even if only one conflict is assumed in the results, the implemented separation strategy is easily extrapolated to multiple conflicts.…”

“…The impact on fuel consumption using RTAs versus continuous operations (CDO and CCO) in the Terminal Manoeuvring Areas (TMAs) has been assessed, for instance, in Ref. [5].…”

Fuel-Efficient Trajectories Traffic Synchronization

“…This means that aircraft attitude (pitch angle) will not be used, and the task can be further simplified by adopting a two-dimensional point-mass model with two DOF (velocity and flight-path angle) [19]. This approach is often used when referring to aircraft scheduling problems [20,21].…”

“…CONOPT was chosen as the NLP solver, as it was designed to cope with various NLP problems, also with the ones with a small number of DOF. This solver was used many times in previous studies for trajectory optimization during descent [20,21]. The design variables were flight-path angle, thrust, velocity, and Mach number.…”