Cross-Sortie Flight Route Optimization

Both the USAF's Air Mobility Command (AMC) and commercial carriers must route multiple aircraft efficiently despite multiple, possibly conflicting requirements (minimize fuel burn, rendezvous on time, etc.). Phase I demonstrated the technical feasibilty of finding optimized routes for a collection of sorties using a combination of parallel distributed processing and advanced search technology. The Phase II effort would enhance and extend the technology demonstrated in Phase I to handle more complicated airspace limitations (e.g., time-dependent clearances) and larger sortie ensembles, while more effectively eliminating suboptimal options to reduce processing demands. The WARP flight-planning system, developed by On Time Systems for AMC, minimizes fuel consumption for individual flights. Development of automated cross-sortie optimization capabilities would extend WARP's benefits to a much broader range of operational settings. The addition of capabilities to manage differing optimization criteria, such as coordinated arrival times or mission durations, would enhance WARP's capabilities still further in important areas. These changes would make WARP more useful both to AMC and in commercial applications, because it would both manage various flight-planning goals and help ensure that inter-mission tradeoffs are made as rationally and efficiently as possible.