Hybridized encoding for evolutionary multi-objective optimization of air traffic network flow: A case study on China

This paper presents a novel hybridized indirect and direct encoding (HybrID) genetic algorithm for solving air traffic network flow optimization problems. A heuristic, which uses the Dijkstra algorithm for generating different types of shortest paths on a graph while controlling the weights on each arc, is proposed for selecting optimal flight routes based on current air traffic. A novel HybrID chromosome representation is employed along with the proposed heuristic and a genetic algorithm for optimization. Experiments on synthetic problems and real data of the Chinese airspace show the proposed method outperforms the direct encoding method on efficiency and efficacy metrics.