Flight management systems and aircraft 4D trajectory optimization

During the last decade, Flight Management Systems have been introduced on modern aircraft to reduce operational costs. Today, the integration of next generation FMS's in the future air traffic management environment requires the development of new capabilities and among them, 4D optimal trajectory generation has become mandatory. This paper presents a method based on Dynamic Programming to generate on-line optimal 4D trajectories. Soft Computing techniques are introduced to improve the dynamic programming oriented optimization process by on-line selection of the search space and by cutting down computation time in repetitive performance evaluations. Copyright (C) 1998 IFAC.