Flexible, Performance-Based route planning for Super-Dense Operations

In this paper, we investigate flexible route planning for Super-Dense Operations (SDO) in the transition airspace around an airportal in the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). A Performance-Based Service (PBS) approach is researched; the route planning techniques directly account for the Required Navigation Performance (RNP) of the aircraft, exploiting better equipment performance in NextGen to achieve SDO conditions for an airportal. To study the trade space, we compare and contrast unstructured, Free Flight approaches to structured routing approaches. Our route planning approaches are flexible in that they allow the routes to conform to the geometry of hazardous weather constraints and dynamically move with the hazardous weather constraints. Unstructured, Free Flight techniques follow a greedy algorithm for planning the most beneficial route for a given aircraft subject to weather, RNP, and aircraft conflict constraints. Flow-based route planning and tree-based route planning approaches are explored as well to understand the benefits of imposing structure in transition airspace.