Adaptive Simulated Annealing with Homogenization for Aircraft Trajectory Optimization

Abstract : In air traffic management, most optimization procedures are commonly based on deterministic modeling and do not take into account the uncertainties on environmental conditions (e.g., wind) and on air traffic control operations. However, aircraft performances in a real-world context are highly sensitive to these uncertainties. The aim of this work is twofold. First, we provide some numerical evidence of the sensitivity of fuel consumption and flight duration with respect to random fluctuations of the wind and the air traffic control operations. Second, we develop a global stochastic optimization procedure for general aircraft performance criteria. Since we consider general (black-box) cost functions, we develop a derivative-free optimization procedure: noisy simulated annealing (NSA).