Network-wide flight trajectories planning in China using an improved genetic algorithm

With the rapid development of Chinese air transportation industry, air traffic becomes increasingly congested thus further worsen the delay problem. As an appealing countermeasure, the Network-wide Flight Trajectories Planning (NFTP) could provide a pre-tactical solution which reduces airspace congestion and flight delay by optimizing the 4D trajectories of all flights in the entire airspace. Notwithstanding, a typical NFTP problem could involve a large number of decision variables with high dimensions. In this paper, therefore, we formulate a single-objective 4D trajectories planning problem to minimize flight delay with limited flight conflicts. In addition, an improved Genetic Algorithm is proposed to handle the large-scale constrained optimization problem. To conquer the lack of realistic factors in the previous work, we present a systematic fast-time simulation and validation framework which is able to demonstrate the improvement of the proposed NFTP solution. Finally, we conduct the validation by a fast-time simulation software called AirTOp with real flight plans over Chinese airspace. The results show that the congestion and flight delay can be reduced in the real operation by the optimization model we proposed.