Overview
Project IMAGINE aimed at developing operational constraints and cost models representative of airline operations.
As part of the MTM activity of CleanSky’s SGO ITD, these models were integrated in the GATAC Optimisation framework to add the operational and economic dimensions to the multi-criteria optimisation of flight trajectories.
IMAGINE developed models for:
- Operational constraints (aircraft and operations limitations, minimum turn-around time, etc.);
- “Basic operations costs” (Aircraft ownership, maintenance, landing and navigation, overhead, etc.);
- Environmental costs (ETS, airport emission charges, noise charges…);
- Crew costs;
- Fleet and schedule related costs, including revenue opportunities and losses.
The originality of IMAGINE relied on:
- The ability to address all the costs with different models: simulation based, statistics based and OR based;
- The ability to handle fleet-wide problems in a single optimisation run and take into account interactions between the flights (for example for crew pairings and schedule impacts);
- The ability to propose near-exact models (with high accuracy but requiring many airline parameters) or approached models based on the innovative surface response methodology, which is well adapted to a generic optimisation framework such as GATAC;
- The validation of the models against real airline data exploiting different types of aircraft: regional turboprops, single-aisles and widebodies;
- The ability of the consortium to deliver industry-level object-oriented code for the implementation of the model.
The consortium involves 2 SMEs with extensive experience in aviation, environment and the development of costs models and optimization engines used daily within different models of airlines.
Finally, the participants have experience in handling such projects, the coordinator having taken a key role in the Clean Sky projects CARING and BASE on flight trajectory optimization and economic modelling of environmental constraints.
Funding
Results
Executive Summary:
Project IMAGINE was a Clean Sky project with focus on economic cost modelling.
Its objectives were:
- Design models for direct operating costs;
- Implement models as GATAC compatible modules that can be used in a trajectory optimization campaign;
- Deliver models to the GATAC team.
The objective was to complement the GATAC trajectory optimisation platform with implementations of economic models. This allowed GATAC to produce new optimal trajectory that can be both environmentally friendly and economically acceptable by airlines.