Scheduling Wind-Optimal Central East Pacific Flights

Abstract

This study addresses one of the issues being raised as a Concept of Operation (CONOPS) is being developed for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), systems to maximize the use of the oceanic domain airspace through new ways of enhancing situational awareness by pilots and new routes that take advantage of wind conditions. Some of these efforts are creating concern about the significant number of new four-dimensional (4-D) crossing points under user-generated routing. These could significantly increase air traffic controllers’ workloads. In this study, new single and multi-objective binary integer programming models that are derivatives of a model originally developed to solve a deterministic traffic flow management problem are proposed. They minimize the total scheduling delay and the weighted sum of the scheduling delay and the number of residual trajectory merge points that are allowed. The study also leverages an innovative technique for transforming a flight scheduling problem into a job scheduling problem. After routing all flights in the Central East Pacific (CEP) on wind-optimal routes and strategically scheduling the flights to reduce the number of trajectory merge points, the delays are calculated. A multi-objective binary integer program is developed to allow trade-offs between the number of trajectory merge points and delays. A trade-off frontier was calculated for a 24-hour scheduling problem. Future trade-offs can be calculated based on what is tolerable in the CEP to implement strategic scheduling.