Air traffic assignment to reduce population noise exposure and fuel consumption using multi-criteria optimisation

Air traffic assignment to departure and arrival routes has a major impact on the population noise exposure in the vicinity of the airport. In some cases, by choosing the suitable air traffic assignment it is possible to avoid overflying populated areas and reduce number of people affected by noise. However, such an approach almost always leads to an increase in route length, and therefore an increase in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Although aircraft noise and fuel consumption reduction are conflicting goals, they both represent pivotal aspects of air transport sustainable development. In this paper, the methods of multi-criteria optimisation are applied, which are generally used when it is necessary to make an optimal decision that requires a compromise (trade-off) solution between two or more conflicting goals. This research aims to develop a mathematical model and to propose an algorithm for air traffic assignment to departure and arrival routes that will, through the Pareto optimality concept, find the approximation of a set of nondominated solutions that minimize population noise exposure and fuel consumption. The approach was demonstrated on Belgrade airport to show the benefits of the proposed model on a real data example. Since all Pareto optimal solutions are considered equally good, from all obtained air traffic assignments, the three representative solutions were compared to the actual air traffic assignment (Base case). The obtained results indicate that the proposed approach can provide solutions which offer a good trade-off between the concerned metrics.