UC Irvine

This research extends previous work on strategic air traffic planning based on an aggregate route model. Assuming a base model has been developed from historic flight data for clear weather days, what is needed for planning on a particular day with predicted convective weather and possibly other planning horizon dependent capacity constraints, is a means of adding appropriate routes to the model to accommodate the conditions of the planning day.

The route redesign to avoid convective weather is formulated as a path planning problem under differential constraints, which generates feasible trajectories for the aircraft. Special emphasis is placed on the trade-off between obtaining realistic trajectories and maintaining the network low dimensionality characteristic of the aggregate route models. Following previous work, the network dynamics are modeled as a discrete linear time-invariant system, and the minimization of an objective function based on the total delay accumulation is then posed as an integer linear programming problem, with the control inputs as the variable. A test case demonstrates an enhancement of the model's performance when managing a convective weather scenario by a 47% reduction of the total time-delay accumulated respect to the results without the network redesign feature.