An Empirical Study on Low Emission Taxiing Path Optimization of Aircrafts on Airport Surfaces from the Perspective of Reducing Carbon Emissions

Abstract

Aircraft emissions are the main cause of airport air pollution. One of the keys to achieving airport energy conservation and emission reduction is to optimize aircraft taxiing paths. The traditional optimization method based on the shortest taxi time is to model the aircraft under the assumption of uniform speed taxiing. Although it is easy to solve, it does not take into account the change of the velocity profile when the aircraft turns. In view of this, this paper comprehensively considered the aircraft’s taxiing distance, the number of large steering times and collision avoidance in the taxi, and established a path optimization model for aircraft taxiing at airport surface with the shortest total taxi time as the target. The genetic algorithm was used to solve the model. The experimental results show that the total fuel consumption and emissions of the aircraft are reduced by 35% and 46%, respectively, before optimization, and the taxi time is greatly reduced, which effectively avoids the taxiing conflict and reduces the pollutant emissions during the taxiing phase. Compared with traditional optimization methods that do not consider turning factors, energy saving and emission reduction effects are more significant. The proposed method is faster than other complex algorithms considering multiple factors, and has higher practical application value. It is expected to be applied in the more accurate airport surface real-time running trajectory optimization in the future. Future research will increase the actual interference factors of the airport, comprehensively analyze the actual situation of the airport’s inbound and outbound flights, dynamically adjust the taxiing path of the aircraft and maintain the real-time performance of the system, and further optimize the algorithm to improve the performance of the algorithm.