A methodology for strategic planning of aircraft trajectories using simulated annealing

Abstract : Global air traffic demand is continuously increasing and it is predicted to be doubled in the near future. In order to sustain such tremendous traffic volume, Air Traffic Management System (ATMS) has to reform its architecture and improve its performance. Since one of the airspace capacity limitations is the air traffic controllers' workload which is strongly related to the traffic situation in the control sector. A possible way to increase the airspace capacity is by mitigating the traffic situation by structuring the aircraft trajectories. This article presents an optimization formulation of the strategic air traffic conflict reduction problem together with a methodology to structure the 4 dimensional aircraft trajectories (3 spatial dimensions and time). The number of interactions (potential conflicts) between aircraft trajectories are minimized using route-slot allocation techniques. We introduce a methodology that uses a Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm combined with a local heuristic search method. Our preliminary results show that this approach can effectively reduce the interactions between aircraft trajectories, thereby decreasing the need of tactical intervention. Therefore reducing the controller's task load.