Use of Hyperspace Trade Analyses to Evaluate Environmental and Performance Tradeoffs for Cruise and Approach Operations

摘要

In aviation there has been an increasing emphasis on considering environmental objectives along with traditional objectives such as performance and cost for the design and operation of air transportation systems. Consequently, selecting the best or optimal design and operation of a system has become more challenging due to the need to resolve multiple, competing environmental-performance tradeoffs. In order to facilitate the development of methods to analyze air transportation system tradeoffs, the Tradeoff Analysis Framework was developed in this research, which can be used to analyze tradeoff hyperspaces comprised of multiple tradeoffs. The framework was applied to two test cases. The first case analyzes environmental-performance tradeoffs for aircraft cruise operations. In particular, the first case study examines changing airline behavior (i.e., their perceived-optimal cruise trajectory) in response to a changing hypothetical tax on the contrails they produce. The results of this study determined that a tax of about $1.62 (per nm of contrails produced) is enough incentive for aircraft to completely avoid producing contrails, given the assumptions made in the study. The second case study analyzes the tradeoffs associated with using Required Area Navigation and Performance (RNAV/RNP) approach procedures. In particular, this case study examined the tradeoffs of using RNAV/RNP to increase throughput at Boston-Logan Airport via dual runway approaches. The results of this study show that while dual approaches increase throughput, the major tradeoff is the corresponding increase in the aggregate amount of fuel burnt, emissions, and population noise exposure. Several important components to analyzing tradeoffs were collectively explored through the case studies. These include the use of valuation theory, for quantifying a stakeholder's relative preference amongst a set of tradeoffs, and hyperspace visualization, for identifying the most dominant tradeoffs and conveying these to the stakeholders.