Environmental Impact Optimisation of Flight Plans in a Fixed and Free Route network

Efforts to minimise the environmental impact of aviation can be implemented at several levels including electric green taxiing systems, novel propulsion systems, jet fuels, improvements in aircraft efficiency and optimisation of climb profiles. In this paper, we address the optimisation of flight plans in a route network considering operational parameters and weather forecast. We implement an A* based approach to explore all possible sequences of nodes, altitudes with given wind, temperature and pressure forecasts in order to minimise total flown distance, total burnt fuel, CO2 and non-CO2 emissions, the latter being responsible for two-thirds of aviation radiative forcing. We evaluated our approach on both a network of standard routes and through free route areas, and observed that our optimised flight plans are consistent with those that have actually been filed to be flown in similar weather conditions during December 2021.