Optimal location of temporary military zones within civil aviation traffic

Abstract : In this study, we focus on the problem of locating optimally temporary military zones with the aim of minimizing the number of civil flight trajectories impacted by the military activity, and the distance between the military zone and the military base. We model the military zones by 2D geometry shapes with a vertical extension associated to given flight levels during the temporary zone-activation time window. We propose a mathematical formulation of this problem as a constrained-optimization problem. We then introduce a global optimization methodology based on a simulated annealing algorithm featuring tailored neighborhood-search strategies. This is applied to one day of French traffic involving 8,836 civil flights. The results show that the proposed method is efficient to locate the military zone that is nearest from the military base, while minimizing the impact on civil flight trajectories.