Departure and Arrival Routes Optimization Near Large Airports

Jérémie Chevalier (1, 2) , Daniel Delahaye (1) , Mohammed Sbihi (1) , Pierre Maréchal (3)

1 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile
2 CGX
3 IMT - Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse UMR5219

The bottleneck of today’s airspace is the Terminal Maneuvering Areas (TMA), where aircraft leave their routes to descend to an airport or take off and reach the en-route sector. To avoid congestion in these areas, an efficient design of departure and arrival routes is necessary. In this paper, a solution for designing departure and arrival routes is proposed, which takes into account the runway configuration, the surroundings of the airport and operational constraints such as limited slopes or turn angles. The routes consist of two parts: a horizontal path in a graph constructed by sampling the TMA around the runway, to which is associated a cone of altitudes. The set of all routes is optimized by the Simulated Annealing metaheuristic. In the process and at each iteration, each route is computed by defining adequately the cost of the arcs in the graph and then searching a path on it. The costs are chosen so as to avoid zigzag behaviors as much as possible. Two tests were performed, one on an instance taken from the literature and the other on an artificial problem designed specifically to test this approach. The obtained results are satisfying with regard to the current state of air operations management and constraints.

Mots clés: SID STAR design; simulated annealing; global optimization

Domaines: Optimisation et contrôle [math.OC]

Jérémie Chevalier, Daniel Delahaye, Mohammed Sbihi, Pierre Maréchal. Departure and Arrival Routes Optimization Near Large Airports. Aerospace, 2019, 6 (7), pp.80. ⟨10.3390/aerospace6070080⟩. ⟨hal-02191040⟩