Simultaneous design of different aircraft departure routes taking community noise exposure events into account

Abstract

At many airports, ground track segments may be shared by different departure routes, and the population living underneath these segments is exposed to all aircraft movements which are sent to these routes. This may cause negative community reaction to authorities and policymakers, leading to objections against the expansion of airport and aircraft operations. To take into account this concern in the design of optimal departure routes, a new multi-objective optimization formulation is developed and solved in this study. Besides two conventional objectives, i.e., annoyance and fuel consumption, a new objective is considered in the problem formulation which aims to split a ground track segment shared by two different departure routes into two different parts corresponding to each route. As a consequence, the number of people exposed to all flights operating on these routes is decreased considerably. An optimization problem with three objectives is formed, and solved by a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D). The reliability and applicability of the developed model are demonstrated through a case study at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. The obtained simulation results reveal that the proposed approach can offer solutions which can more effectively balance between the considered objectives.