Energetically Optimal Path Following for Electric Aircraft Taxi Systems Based on Convex Optimization

In an effort to reduce aircraft fuel consumption and emissions in airports, electric driving systems are being studied by several stakeholders. When assessing the overall benefit at mission level in the design of those systems, it is necessary to determine the optimal control strategy of the system on ground for a given architecture in order to compare the performances of different designs. This paper deals with optimal path-following of taxi trajectories with an aircraft equipped with a specific architecture of electric driving system. The problem is formulated in convex form to ensure that a global optimum is found. While different objectives may be pursued, the most important one for this application is the minimization of the fuel consumption of the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) that supplies the electric driving system. Critical system constraints such as the thermal behavior of the electric motors are considered. Finally, results of several optimization setups with different objectives and constraints are presented and compared.