Aircraft Emergency Trajectory Design: A Fast Marching Method on a Triangular Mesh

Lucas Ligny (1) , Andréas Guitart (1) , Daniel Delahaye (1) , Banavar Sridhar (2)

1 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile
2 ARC - NASA Ames Research Center

In this paper, an efficient algorithm to generate a short and safe trajectory for an aircraft in a situation of emergency is proposed. The algorithm is to be run on a Flight Management System, hence the computation performance, the size of the stored data and the quality of the solution are taken as primary stakes. The algorithm is based on a front propagation algorithm, the Fast Marching method. Fronts are propagated on a single glide slope, allowing the algorithm to provide a flyable trajectory in a very short time (a few seconds). The algorithm is tested in a mountainous environment, and both shortness and safeness are obtained in response to a critical emergency.

Mots clés: Emergency Trajectory Generation; Fast Marching; Glide Slope; Triangular Mesh; Quadtree

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Optimisation et contrôle [math.OC]

Lucas Ligny, Andréas Guitart, Daniel Delahaye, Banavar Sridhar. Aircraft Emergency Trajectory Design: A Fast Marching Method on a Triangular Mesh. Fourteenth USA/Europe Air Traffic Management Research and Development Seminar, Sep 2021, New-Orlean, United States. ⟨hal-03344402⟩