Automatic Design of Aircraft Arrival Routes with Limited Turning Angle

We present an application of Integer Programming to the design of arrival routes for aircraft in a Terminal Maneuvering Area (TMA). We generate operationally feasible merge trees of curvatureconstrained routes, using two optimization criteria: (1) total length of the tree, and (2) distance flown along the tree paths. The output routes guarantee that the overall traffic pattern in the TMA can be monitored by air traffic controllers; in particular, we keep merge points for arriving aircraft well separated, and we exclude conflicts between arriving and departing aircraft. We demonstrate the feasibility of our method by experimenting with arrival routes for a runway at Arlanda airport in the Stockholm TMA. Our approach can easily be extended in several ways, e.g., to ensure that the routes avoid no-fly zones. 1998 ACM Subject Classification G.1.6 Optimization: Integer programming, J.2 Physical Sciences and Engineering: Aerospace