Toward a More Realistic, Cost-Effective, and Greener Ground Movement Through Active Routing—Part I: Optimal Speed Profile Generation

Among all airport operations, aircraft ground movement plays a key role in improving overall airport capacity as it links other airport operations. Moreover, ever-increasing air traffic, rising costs, and tighter environmental targets create pressure to minimize fuel burn on the ground. However, current routing functions envisioned in Advanced Surface Movement, Guidance and Control Systems almost exclusively consider the most time-efficient solution and apply a conservative separation to ensure conflict-free surface movement, sometimes with additional buffer times to absorb small deviations from the taxi times. Such an overly constrained routing approach may result in either a too tight planning for some aircraft so that fuel efficiency is compromised due to multiple acceleration phases, or performance could be further improved by reducing the separation and buffer times. In light of this, Parts I and II of this paper present a new Active Routing (AR) framework with the aim of providing a more realistic, cost-effective, and environmental friendly surface movement, targeting some of the busiest international hub airports. Part I of this paper focuses on optimal speed profile generation using a physics-based aircraft movement model. Two approaches based, respectively, on the Base of Aircraft Data and the International Civil Aviation Organization engine emissions database have been employed to model fuel consumption. These models are then embedded within a multiobjective optimization framework to capture the essence of different speed profiles in a Pareto optimal sense. The proposed approach represents the first attempt to systematically address speed profiles with competing objectives. Results reveal an apparent tradeoff between fuel burn and taxi times irrespective of fuel consumption modeling approaches. This will have a profound impact on the routing and scheduling and open the door for the new concept of AR discussed in Part II of this paper.