Flight Plan Optimization System

To create a flight plan is to determine the path, altitude, and speed an airplane will use during its flight. This plan must be submitted to regulatory authorities before takeoff and updated throughout the flight. Increasing fuel costs give an added importance to these decisions. New policies offering an increased flexibility in choosing paths and new information systems giving access to more complete and up-to-date weather information pave the way for productivity gains for air carriers. This project aims to develop systems to make the best decisions by taking advantage of the latest flexibility and information. Flights take place in a four-dimension space, i.e. longitude, latitude, altitude and time. Optimizing flight plans within this non-homogeneous space is a very difficult task because of the existing obstacles and the variations in airplane performance dependent on non-linear and non-convex functions for altitude, temperature, wind, and weight of remaining fuel. This team is proposing to model this space as a network where nodes are points in space and time, and arcs relevant movements between these points. Paths within this network are potential flight plans, and the path of minimum cost obtained through dynamic programming is the best flight plan.