Optimal assignment of time of departure under severe weather

Abstract

Severe weather poses a significant threat to flight safety and operation efficiency. A rerouting path is essential for aircraft to elude severe weather. Two issues related to rerouting are how to design a flight path and how to reduce operation time. We adopted ant colony optimization to design flight paths. The optimal time of departure was achieved through sensitivity analysis on various weights. Compared with current ground delay programs, the proposed solution can obtain the balance between total time and fuel consumption.