Trajectory-based Air Traffic Management (TB-ATM) under Weather Uncertainty

Explosive growth of commercial air travel poses great challenges to air traffic management and causes increasing delays. Much of the delay is weather induced. The traditional routing strategy, which consists of an aircraft under a predicted storm avoiding the bad weather zone completely, is too conservative. One way to reduce delays caused by enroute weather is to take a less conservative route, risking higher delay to attain a better expected delay, instead of avoiding the bad weather zone completely. In order to implement this strategy, one approach involves shifting the current airspace-based air traffic management system to a trajectory-based air traffic management (TB-ATM) system where there is only one controller responsible for each aircraft from gate to gate. We address the single aircraft problem using Markov decision processes (where the weather processes is modeled as a stationary Markov chain) and a dynamic programming algorithm. The approach provides a dynamic routing strategy for an aircraft that minimizes the expected delay, when the aircraft’s nominal path may be obstructed by a bad weather. Our algorithm is implemented in different aircraft routing scenarios and the improvements in delays in comparison with the traditional methods are shown.