Flight Trajectory Optimization for Modern Jet Passenger Aircraft with Dynamic Programming

Future Air Transportation Systems (ATS) would eventually have to treat the ever increasing demands in aviation industry. Fuel consumption and flight time could be significantly reduced by modifying the current sector based system into a more relaxed user priority based ATS. Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) is considered as one of the key technologies in this transition. This paper concentrates on a proposed flight trajectory optimization tool based on Dynamic Programming (DP), meteorological data and an aircraft performance model to obtain fuel minimum 4D-optimal flight trajectories for a single jet passenger aircraft considering the effect of wind conditions. Major drawbacks such as “Curse of Dimensionality” in DP are overcome with a unique method called “Moving Search space Dynamic Programming (MS-DP)” method. A quantitative evaluation has revealed that an average reduction of 9% in fuel consumption could be achieved with a tradeoff of flight time which exceeds at an average of 7% compared to a series of flight data measured by a commercial GPS receiver in an airliner cabin.