Route Network Flow Assignment in the new generation of aviation by cooperative co-evolution

Instead of assigning 3D trajectories of the flights in some sectors under traditional Air Traffic Management (ATM), the Route Network Flow Assignment (RNFA) problem is redefined in the new generation of aviation. It needs to properly assign both the 3D trajectories and the time slots (4D trajectories) for all the flights in the whole airspace, aiming at maximizing the use of airspace and alleviating the air traffic congestion. It is an optimization problem in essence and has to optimize all the flights' 4D trajectories. This problem is challenging because of the large scale of the flights and the relativity among them. To deal with it, this paper puts forward an effective method. The main idea is to introduce a divide-and-conquer strategy to divide this large scale problem into small ones. During which, a dynamic grouping operator is adopted, while considering the relativity among the flights. For the optimization of the subcomponents, a dual coding Differential Evolution (DE) method is proposed to adapt the high efficiency DE to this discrete optimization problem. The experimental results show that our method can solve the RNFA problem both effectively and efficiently and outperforms the current approaches. Moreover, the application of the proposed methodology can also be served as a benchmark application in the fields of the large scale problems' optimization.