Emission-aware adjustable robust flight path planning with respect to fuel and contrail cost

Abstract

Aviation emission has always been regarded as the major contributor to climate and atmosphere changes. The recent research suggested that flights can be re-routed from sufficiently cold and humid atmospheres to mitigate the level of contrail production in particular regions during the flight planning stage. To address the needs, a weather data-driven flight path planning is proposed in this work. The spatial meteorological condition is generated using historical data and formulated as uncertain factors to develop a robust solution. Airlines can determine their allowance of flight level changes, pre-determined constrained flight levels set and robustness towards the maximum tolerance level of uncertain contrail length of a flight path. The overall cost can be further minimised, with a lowered total contrail length with the least increases in fuel consumption cost. The suggested methods validate the possibility of emission-aware adjustable robust flight path planning and ensure sustainable air transport operations.

KEYWORDS:

• Emission-aware flight path planning
• aviation emission control
• contrail length
• adjustable robust optimisation
• decomposition framework

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Correction

Acknowledgements

The research is supported by Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR. Our gratitude is also extended to the Research Committee of the Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University for support of the project (BE3V, UALL). The authors would like to express their appreciation to the Wyoming weather web, University of Wyoming, Laramie, USA and FlightTrader24 for their assistance with the data collection and open-source data platform.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21680566.2022.2043619).

Notes

1 Retrieved from http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/seasia.html

2 Information from https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news-from-members/433-weather-stations-recognized-chinese-centennial-observing-station

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grant Council, The Hong Kong Government [grant number PolyU25218321] and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University [grant number BE3V,UALL].