A Scheme of Sustainable Trajectory Optimization for Aircraft Cruise Based on Comprehensive Social Benefit

The increasing demand for environmentally friendly and passenger-favored flight operation requires a systematic scheme of sustainable trajectory optimization for the aircraft cruise. This paper achieves it by proposing an innovative performance framework based on the comprehensive benefit to the society considering both economic and noneconomic ones, following which the sustainable trajectory optimization problem is modeled by discretization. A method combining forward recurrence and memoization operation, called memoization dynamic programming, is developed to solve the model with computational efficiency. Working with real-world operational data of a typical flight route, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme at different levels and explore the difference in its performance due to meteorological conditions, aircraft type, and time horizon. The scheme is proved to perform robustly in comprehensive performance with a stable benefit rate of about 8% through sensitivity analysis, by which we find that it is relatively better for the flights cruising on business route with a load factor of 85%. Tradeoff results suggest that the systematic consideration of both the economic and noneconomic performance contributes to improved integrated sustainability. In particular, the optimal comprehensive performance at a monthly level can be obtained when accepting an additional $26,500 economic cost.