Robust Aircraft Trajectory Planning Under Wind Uncertainty Using Optimal Control

Uncertainty in aircraft trajectory planning and prediction generates major challenges for the future air traffic management system. Therefore, understanding and managing uncertainty will be necessary to realize improvements in air traffic capacity, safety, efficiency, and environmental impact. Meteorology (in particular, winds) represents one of the most relevant sources of uncertainty. In the present work, a framework based on optimal control is introduced to address the problem of robust and efficient trajectory planning under wind forecast uncertainty, which is modeled with probabilistic forecasts generated by ensemble prediction systems. The proposed methodology is applied to a flight planning scenario under a free-routing operational paradigm and employed to compute trajectories for different sets of user preferences, exploring the trade-off between average flight cost and predictability. Results show how the impact of wind forecast uncertainty in trajectory predictability at a pretactical planning horizon can be not only quantified, but also reduced through the application of the proposed approach.