Speaker
Description
The aviation sector is expanding annually, with an expected market size of nearly 340 billion USD in 2024. This growth raises significant concerns about fuel consumption and the corresponding CO2 emissions. Every day, approximately 1.3 million people commute within Europe using airplanes, resulting in roughly 240,000 tonnes of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. Therefore, reducing fuel emissions is of utmost importance. Here we focus on implicitly reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by optimizing the routes that aircraft take.
We present an algorithm capable of finding a continuous globally optimal trajectory for an aircraft in a stationary wind field. The algorithm effectively solves a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation associated with the flight trajectory optimization problem, employing linear finite elements and effective parallelization. Furthermore, we demonstrate linear convergence of the algorithm by giving an explicit bound for the error estimate of arrival time. Finally, we sketch an approach to global optimality guarantees. By combining the algorithm with existing optimal control approaches, we can find a globally optimal path within a desired accuracy.
