Flight Trajectory Planning
November 27, 2024 2:00 PM Singapore (Registration starts at 1:50 PM)
Abstract
The Flight Planning Problem deals with the computation of a best possible aircraft route subject to weather conditions, traffic flow restrictions, and overflight fees, the objective is usually to minimize a combination of costs and travel time. The problem can be approached from a discrete and from a continuous point of view. From a discrete point of view, the problem can be modelled as a shortest path problem in a world wide 3D airway network and solved using A* techniques. These are tailored to the specific application using special preprocessing techniques, lower bounds derived from super-optimal winds and idealized vertical profiles, multi-label algorithms to deal with several objectives, and SAT-techniques to deal with traffic flow restrictions. From a continuous point of view, which is currently gaining importance under the upcoming free flight paradigm, the problem is a generalization of the classical Zermelo navigation problem. In this case, it is possible to solve the global optimization problem to proven optimality (up to any desired accuracy) using a discrete-continuous adaptive discretization approach. The talk discusses these developments and their application in one of the leading flight planning systems.
LINK TO RESEARCH (including all publications):
- Flight Trajectory Planning: https://www.zib.de/research/projects/flight-trajectory-optimization-airway-networks
- Discrete-continuous flight planning: https://www.zib.de/research/projects/discrete-continuous-shortest-path-problems-flight-planning
About the Speaker
Ralf Borndörfer is a Professor for Discrete Mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin and head of the Network Optimization department at Zuse-Institute Berlin; he also serves as Chair of the Research Campus Mathematical Optimization and Data Analysis Laboratories (MODAL), as Scientist in Charge of the Application Area Networks and as Chair of the Council of the Berlin Mathematics Excellence Cluster Math+, as president of the heureka Foundation for Environment and Mobility, and as one of the heads of the Traffic and Transport working group of the German Operations Research Society. His work is on combinatorial optimization and integer programming with applications to traffic and transport. He was head of several projects with Lufthansa Systems, in which the VOLAR core of LSY’s flight planning system Lido Flight 4D was developed, with Deutsche Bahn, in which RotOR, an ICE highspeed train rotation optimizer based on hypergraphical methods, was developed, and with IVU Traffic Technologies, in which most of the optimizers in ivu.plan and ivu.rail were developed. RotOR was presented as part of DB’s FEO system in the finals of the 2020 INFORMS Edelman award. He is one of the founders of LBW Optimization, a supplier of commercial high performance vehicle and duty optimization systems. His current research is on geometric optimization methods for periodic timetabling, discrete and continuous optimization methods for flight planning, electric vehicle scheduling, predictive railway maintenance, air cargo scheduling, and toll enforcement.
For more information about the ESD Seminar, please email esd_invite@sutd.edu.sg