A Stochastic Switched Optimal Control Approach to Formation Mission Design for Commercial Aircraft

This article studies the formation mission design problem for commercial aircraft in the presence of uncertainties. Specifically, it considers uncertainties in the departure times of the aircraft and in the fuel burn savings for the trailing aircraft. Given several commercial flights, the problem consists in arranging them in formation or solo flights and finding the trajectories that minimize the expected value of the DOC of the flights. The formation mission design problem is formulated as an optimal control problem of a stochastic switched dynamical system and solved using nonintrusive gPC-based stochastic collocation. The stochastic collocation method converts the SSOCP into an augmented deterministic switched optimal control problem. With this approach, a small number of sample points of the random parameters are used to jointly solve particular instances of the switched optimal control problem. The obtained solutions are then expressed as orthogonal polynomial expansions in terms of the random parameters using these sample points. This technique allows statistical and global sensitivity analysis of the stochastic solutions to be conducted at a low computational cost. The aim of this article is to establish if, in the presence of uncertainties, a formation mission is beneficial with respect to solo flight in terms of the expected value of the direct operating costs. Several numerical experiments have been conducted in which uncertainties on the departure times and on the fuel saving during formation flight have been considered. The obtained results demonstrate that benefits can be achieved even in the presence of these uncertainties.