Generation and Evaluation of Near-Optimum Vertical Flight Profiles

The overall objectives of this research effort have been to develop and evaluate algorithms and flight management concepts for minimization of fuel or direct operating costs. These concepts are to be used for flight planning or for on-board computation and steering of turbojet transport aircraft in the vertical path. Within this research context, a computer program, called OPTIM, has been developed to use these algorithms to generate near-optimum vertical reference profiles. OPTIM contains control options to examine effects of various flight constraints on cost performance. A companion program, called TRAGEN, was developed to simulate an aircraft flying along a given vertical reference profile. TRAGEN is used to verify OPTIM´s output, to examine the effects of parameter value uncertainty (such as prevailing wind), and to compare cost performance of profiles generated by different techniques. This paper describes OPTIM and TRAGEN and presents examples of the programs´ utility.