Comparison Between Two Wind-Optimal Strategic Flight Plannings for North Atlantic Traffic

摘要

The North Atlantic oceanic airspace is considered the most congested oceanic airspace in the world. For manyyears, air traffic control in this airspace has experienced difficulties due to the limited radar coverage. To supportconflict-free flight progress, a structure of routes, called the organized track system, is established in the NorthAtlantic airspace and very restrictive separation standards are applied. The development of the automated dependentsurveillance-broadcast system provides an opportunity to improve the flight planning operations over the oceansby reducing separation norms. The aim of this study is to improve the traffic efficiency in the North Atlantic airspaceby developing new approaches to organize the transatlantic traffic at the strategic level. The first considered approachproposes a new route structure, referred to as the wind-optimal track network, to replace the organized track system,whereas the second one is based on the wind-optimal free routes. The problem is modeled as an optimization problemand resolved further via simulated annealing combined with a sliding window algorithm. The results of thesimulations performed on the real traffic data prove that about 76% of flights decrease their cruising times by morethan half of an hour when flying wind-optimal tracks rather than using their great circle routes from the departure tothe destination. Furthermore, by comparing the two proposed methods, it is concluded that using wind-optimal freeroutes implies lower cruising times, whereas the wind-optimal track network is much more robust under changingwind fields.