Potential benefits of arrival time assignment: Dynamic programming trajectory optimization applied to the Tokyo international airport

Increasing the efficiency and capacity of flights arriving at a congested airport is one of the most challenging problems in air traffic management research. The efficiency of commercial jet airliner flights arriving at the Tokyo International Airport, the busiest airport in Japan, is analyzed using integrated Air Route Surveillance Radar information. Fuel consumption is estimated for each flight from the surveillance data using meteorological and aircraft performance data. The actual flight is compared with the optimized trajectory in terms of fuel consumption and flight time, which introduces the potential benefits of optimizing the flight. A total performance index, which comprises the fuel consumption and flight times of each flight, is proposed to optimize all flights arriving at the airport under the constraint of safe time separation at the terminal point. Dynamic programming is used to optimize not only each trajectory but also the arrival time assignment, where arrival times are assigned to each flight to minimize the total performance index. The results show that a rational arrival sequence and time assignment are generated by the optimization method, and the potential benefit deterioration due to imposing the arrival time separation constraint is limited.