Weather-Optimized Individual Routes in a Global Scenario

Abstract

Changing climate towards higher temperatures and associated increased convective activity impede future air traffic. This paper investigates how environmental sustainability can be improved without jeopardizing safety and efficiency. Therefore, trajectories are computed to efficiently fulfill operational requirements while considering safety in terms of separation minima and convective weather constraints. The focus is in particular on the procedural implementation of a corresponding flight planning procedure, which respects the named requirements. Even though single flight optimization may result in new conflicts between the corresponding flights, and conflict resolution might destroy the benefits from single flight optimization, the complete system proved to be stable in trials with a Benelux scenario. The conflict resolution algorithms used on the optimized trajectories do not significantly downgrade the achieved efficiency.