A soft dynamic programming approach for on-line aircraft 4D-trajectory optimization

During the last decade, Flight Management Systems (FMS) have been introduced on board modern aircraft to reduce operational costs, and flight profiles have been optimized in order to minimize fuel and time-related costs. Today, the integration of next generation FMS in the future air traffic management environment requires the development of new capabilities and among them, on-line real time 4D-trajectory generation has become mandatory. This paper presents a method based on dynamic programming (DP) to generate optimal 4D-trajectories in the presence of multiple time constraints. Soft computing techniques are introduced to improve the DP oriented optimization process by on-line selection of the search space and by cutting down computation time in repetitive performance evaluations.