Conflict free time based trajectory planning for aircraft taxi automation with refined taxiway modeling
Summary To mitigate airport congestion caused by increasing air traffic demand, the trajectory based surface operations concept has been proposed to improve surface movement efficiency while maintaining safety. It utilizes decision support tools to provide optimized time based trajectories for each aircraft and uses automation systems to guide surface movements and monitor their conformance with assigned trajectories. Whether the time based trajectories can be effectively followed so that the expected benefits can be guaranteed depends firstly on whether these trajectories are realistic. So, this paper first deals with the modeling biases of the network model typically used for taxi trajectory planning via refined taxiway modeling. Then it presents a zone control based dynamic routing and timing algorithm upon the refined taxiway model to find the shortest time taxi route and timings for an aircraft. Finally, the presented algorithm is integrated with a sequential planning framework to continuously decide taxi routes and timings. Experimental results demonstrate that the solution time for an aircraft can be steadily around a few milliseconds with timely cleaning of expired time windows, showing potential for real time decision support applications. The results also show the advantages of the proposed methodology over existing approaches. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.