Using Aircraft Requirements as Variables: An Integrated Optimization Approach for Air Transportation Systems

Recent international goals for the future development of aviation emphasize the improvement of performance metrics of air transportation systems. Since traditional design processes typically target only individual system elements, like aircraft or air transportation networks, it appears desirable to integrate these different efforts into a single optimization approach. High- fidelity design tools for individual systems are computationally expensive. However, conceptual design methods are typically relatively time efficient. Therefore, this paper introduces an optimization approach that combines conceptual aircraft and network design. The approach couples both tasks by those aircraft requirements that are also relevant for network design, such as aircraft range and capacity. The idea is to provide a subsequent, more detailed aircraft design process with requirement values that appear promising to improve an entire air transportation system. This investigation is exploratory because it focusses on introducing the problem rather than deriving any real world design attributes. The aircraft design part uses the DLR code VAMPZero. Like other conceptual aircraft design tools, it is fast and provides acceptable results for conventional air vehicle configurations. A two-stage network design and passenger allocation model optimizes a reduced scale real world air transportation network. As an illustrative example, the implemented approach solves an illustrative but simplistic intra-European air travel optimization problem.