Path Planning Method for General Aviation under Hazardous Weather Using Heuristic Algorithm

Weather is one of the most important factors threatening the safety of general aviation. It is necessary to avoid the possible hazardous weather regions according to the weather forecast in the planning stage. In this paper, a flight path planning method based on phased altitude changes is proposed. The influence of hazardous weather in different altitudes of the airspace is discretized into gridding polygons. In order to evaluate the influence of hazardous weather on flight paths, flight distance is used to construct cost function and maneuver of the aircraft is modeled as the constraint condition. As the result, a flight path with minimum cost is planned using heuristic algorithm in the gridding system. Numerical simulations show that the flight distance of the path planned by the proposed method is shorter than the planned path that with a constant flight altitude.