Parallel Computation in Air Traffic Guidance

Abstract

Guidance of several aircraft in the vicinity of an airport has become a demanding computational task in recent years. The aim of the traffic management is to prescribe flight trajectories, which minimize delays and/or fuel consumption and which guarantee, that the minimal inter-aircraft distance stays beyond a given value. From the mathematical point of view, this problem can be formulated as an optimal control problem with state constraints. Because of the constantly changing flight conditions and varying demands from ground control, the corresponding problem has to be solved in realtime. A robust and still optimal control of many aircraft requires efficient methods for the compution of feedback controls.

Supported in parts FORTWIHR, the Bavarian Consortium for High Performance Computing