A two-stage speed profile design methodology for smooth and fuel efficient aircraft ground movement

Automation of airport operations can greatly improve the ground movement efficiency. To this end, the taxi planning problem has been studied extensively in recent years, which aims to make full use of existing resources to reduce taxi time while ensuring safety. In this paper, we further study the aircraft ground movement speed profile design problem constrained by the surface time-based trajectory generated in taxi planning to facilitate precise guidance capabilities envisioned by the next generation air transportation system. A decomposed approach of two stages is presented to efficiently solve this problem. In the first stage, speeds are allocated at control points so that smooth speed profiles are expected to be found later. In the second stage, detailed speed profiles for each taxi interval are generated according to the allocated control point speeds which minimize the overall fuel consumption index. We present a swarm intelligence based solution approach for the first-stage problem and a discrete variable driven enumeration method for the second-stage problem. Experimental results show impressive performance of the presented methodology upon real world taxi speed profile design problems.