"En-Route Optimal Flight Planning Constrained to
Pass Through Way-points using MINLP" will be
presented in the upcoming Air Traffic Management
Seminar 2011 in Berlin in June. All the credit
should go to my co-authors: Manuel
Soler, Alberto Olivares and Ernesto
Staffetti from the Department of Signal and Communication Theory at Universidad Rey Juan
Carlos. Manuel, Alberto and Ernesto even made
a cool video of a flight going from Madrid to
Berlin. The plane is constrained to pass through
way-points (the colored dots in the video) whose
sequence is not predefined. The problem is to find
which way-point to pass through and in which order.
Many aspects of the flight dynamics are taken into
account and all data is realistic (even the wind is
from a real forecast). The plane is an A320 and the
objective is to minimize its fuel consumption. The
moving yellow line in the video is a (locally)
optimal trajectory for the plane.