On January 16, Dr. María Cerezo, visiting professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, starred in the Aerospace PhD Seminar Series.
Her talk was entitled: “Exploring the possibilities of commercial formation flight using a stochastic optimal control approach” and took place at the UC3M’s Salón de Grados at 13h, also broadcasted online.
Abstract:
Currently, the main challenge for global aviation is to ensure that the predicted growth in air traffic for the coming decades remains sustainable from an environmental point of view, and that the air traffic management system meets the expected demand for increased capacity. Formation flight offers great promise in terms of improving both the environmental impact of aviation and the capacity of the air traffic management system.
In this seminar, we address the formation mission design problem for commercial aircraft in the presence of uncertainties. Specifically, it considers uncertainties in aircraft departure times and in the fuel burn savings for the trailing aircraft. Given several commercial flights, the problem consists in arranging them in formation or as solo flights and finding the trajectories that will minimize the expected value of the direct operating cost of the flights. Since each aircraft can fly solo or in different positions inside a formation, the mission is modeled as a stochastic switched dynamical system, in which aircraft flight modes are described by sets of stochastic ordinary differential equations, the discrete states of the system describe the combination of flight modes of the individual aircraft, and the switching logic among the discrete states is defined by logical constraints. Also, chance constraints have been included.
The obtained results demonstrate that benefits can be achieved even in the presence of typical air traffic uncertainties and that formation flight has great potential to reduce fuel consumption and emissions in commercial aviation.
