Optimal control approaches for aircraft conflict avoidance using speed regulation : a numerical study

Abstract : In this paper a numerical study is provided to solve the aircraft conflict avoidance problem through velocity regulation maneuvers. Starting from optimal controlbased model and approaches in which aircraft accelerations are the controls, and by applying the direct shooting technique, we propose to study two different largescale nonlinear optimization problems. In order to compare different possibilities of implementation, two environments (AMPL and MATLAB) and deterministic local optimization solvers are used. Numerical results are discussed. They show that the considered problem is really difficult to solve to global optimality, as different local minima are found using different methods.