Abstract
Effective solutions are required to meet the ever increasing demands in the aviation industry. Flight trajectory optimization is considered one of the core technologies to improve the operational performance of conventional air transportation systems. This paper provides an in-depth quantitative evaluation on potential benefits achieved by performing flight trajectory optimization with respect to a series of flight data obtained by secondary surveillance radar data. Dynamic programming is used as the optimization tool to achieve optimal flight trajectories by considering the tradeoff between fuel consumption and flight time. Meteorological data of the Japan Meteorological Agency and the base of aircraft data (BADA) model data of the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation are utilized to evaluate the operational performance of both flight data and optimal trajectories. Operational performance results of flight data show a significant variation in the tradeoff between fuel consumption and flight time according to descent speed selection and vectoring in the terminal airspace. Optimal trajectories achieve a considerable reduction of fuel consumption while complying with arrival time constraints by adjusting the top of descent setting and descent speed.
