Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for automated merging multiple aircraft flows in a busy Terminal Maneuvering Area (TMA). This work is motivated by the current overloaded airspace in the Beijing Capital international airport, the highlighted delay in the China air transportation and the need of more efficient methods to help air traffic controllers. Present research consists of a new approach to optimize a set of aircraft planned to land at a given airport based on multi-agents technique, which is automated generating comprehensive sequencing plan and conflicts-free trajectories.The architecture of the system is based on a Point Merge (PM) route structure to enable expediting or delaying aircraft while staying on lateral navigation mode.The whole system is designed by two main models to manage the process of arriving flows: Sequencing leg and Link. And then, 4 kinds of agents are designed to support the implementation of this automated system: aircraft agent, flow manager agent, conflict detection and resolution agent and 4D trajectory planning agent. We consider the 4D trajectory-based operation situation in TMA and apply different wake turbulence constraint in these two models. Finally, aconclusion is made and future work is outlined. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Abstract

In this paper we study the en-route strategic flight planning of a commercial aircraft constrained to pass through a set of waypoints whose sequence is not predefined. This problem has been solved as an hybrid optimal control problem in which, given the dynamic model of the aircraft, the initial and final states, the path constraints constituting the envelope of flight, and a set of waypoints in the European air space, one has to find the control inputs, the switching times, the optimal sequence of waypoints and the corresponding trajectory of the aircraft that minimize the direct operating cost during the flight. The complete layout of waypoints in the European airspace is reduced and waypoints are gathered into a small number of clusters. The aircraft is constrained to pass through one waypoint inside every cluster of waypoints. The presence of multi point constraints makes the optimal control problem particularly difficult to solve. The hybrid optimal control problem is converted into a mixed integer non linear programming problem first making the unknown switching times part of the state, then introducing binary variable to enforce the constraint of passing through one waypoint inside every cluster, and finally applying a direct collocation method. The resulting mixed integer non linear programming problem has been solved using a branch and bound algorithm. The cases studied and the numerical results show the effectiveness, efficiency and applicability of this method for enroute strategic flight plans definition.