Air Traffic Efficiency Analysis of Airliner Scheduled Flights Using Collaborative Actions for Renovation of Air Traffic Systems Open Data

Abstract

The increase in air traffic worldwide requires improvement of flight operational efficiency. This study aims to reveal the potential benefits, namely, savings on fuel consumption and flight time, which are expected for Japanese airspace, by statistically evaluating the operational efficiency defined by average differences of fuel consumption, flight time, and flight distance between the original and the optimized flight of domestic flights in Japan. The aircraft position and time data used in this study were obtained from Collaborative Actions for Renovation of Air Traffic Systems Open Data—the radar data released by the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau. Flight information, such as air data and fuel flow, is estimated by applying meteorological data and aircraft performance model to the position information of radar data. Each reconstructed trajectory is optimized in terms of flight fuel consumption and flight time with an assumed cost index (CI). Dynamic programming is used as the trajectory optimization method. The flight fuel consumption and flight time of the optimized flight are compared with the original values to evaluate the operational efficiency. Herein, approximately one-third of 1-day data, i.e., 1087 cases of four aircraft types, are analyzed with reasonable CI settings. Our research findings suggest that flight fuel consumption and flight distance can be saved by 312 kg and 19.7 km, respectively, on average for the object flights. Following a statistical comparison between the original and the optimized flights, it was observed that two types of features, namely, flying on a detoured path and flying with nonoptimal altitude and speed in the cruise phase, are major factors which deteriorate the total operational efficiency in terms of fuel consumption, flight time, and flight distance.

Document type: Article