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Aircraft Route Optimization For Formation Flight, Jia Xu, Andrew Ning, Geoffrey Bower, Ilan Kroo
Aircraft Route Optimization For Formation Flight, Jia Xu, Andrew Ning, Geoffrey Bower, Ilan Kroo
Faculty Publications
We quantify the fuel and cost benefits of applying extended formation flight to com- mercial airline operations. Central to this study is the development of a bi-level, mixed integer-real formation flight optimization framework. The framework has two main components: 1) a continuous domain aircraft mission performance optimization and 2) an integer optimization component that selects the best combination of optimized missions to form a formation flight schedule. The mission performance reflects the effects of rolled-up wakes, formation heterogeneity, and formation-induced compressibility. The results show that an airline can use formation flight to reduce fuel burn by 5.8% or direct operating …