Optimization of the vertical flight profile on the flight management system for green aircraft

To reduce aircraft’s fuel consumption, a new method to calculate flight trajectories to be implemented in commercial Flight Management Systems has been developed. The aircraft’s model was obtained from a flight performance database, which included experimental flight data. The optimized trajectories for three different commercial aircraft have been analyzed and developed in this thesis. To obtain the optimal flight trajectory that reduces the global flight cost, the vertical and the LNAV profiles have been studied and analyzed to find the aircraft’s available speeds, possible flight altitudes and alternative horizontal trajectories that could reduce the global fuel consumption. A dynamic weather model has been implemented to improve the precision of the algorithm. This weather model calculates the speed and direction of wind, and the outside air temperature from a public weather database. To reduce the calculation time, different time-optimization algorithms have been implemented, such as the Golden Section search method, and different types of genetic algorithms. The optimization algorithm calculates the aircraft trajectory considering the departure and arrival airport coordinates, the aircraft parameters, the in-flight restrictions such as speeds, altitudes and WPs. The final output is given in terms of the flight time, fuel consumption and global flight cost of the complete flight. To validate the optimization algorithm results, the software FlightSIM® has been used. This software considers a complete aircraft aerodynamic model for its simulations, giving results that are accurate and very close to reality.