P8. A pilot/dispatcher support tool based on the enhanced provision of thunderstorm forecasts considering its inherent uncertainty (‘STORMY’)

3 – Efficient provision and use of meteorological information in ATM

Uncertainties inherent to convective weather constitute a major challenge for the Air Traffic Management System (ATM), affecting its safety, capacity, and efficiency. Specifically, thunderstorms represent an important threat, as they involve phenomena such as strong turbulence, wind shear or hail. It is essential to avoid them to ensure both passenger comfort and aircraft structural integrity. Thunderstorms’ location and timing are hard to predict with certainty. This stochasticity is an important element that methodologies for aircraft trajectory planning must take into account.

For this purpose, two different methodologies for flight planning in areas of uncertain thunderstorm development are proposed. Both are heuristic approaches that rely on the iterative manipulation of graphs. Moreover, to enhance computational performance and enable real time operation, they are parallelized by means of GPU programming, producing results in less than seconds.

On one hand, the Scenario-Based Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (Scenario-Based RRTs or SB-RRTs) are introduced, three algorithms for trajectory planning that explore an airspace with a tree structure. This kind of graph grows from the origin and looks for a connection with the destination through a safe sequence of tree branches. On the other hand, the Augmented Random Search (ARS) is proposed for trajectory deformation. This algorithm is applied to a graph, and it looks for the optimal sequence of edges, its relocation, and the best profile of velocities to minimize a combination of time and fuel.

The methodologies are tested with Ensemble Prediction Systems (EPS) that characterize atmospheric uncertainties through a set of possible forecasts. Results reveal that the algorithms are able to ensure safety and minimize objectives, such as time of flight, flight distance or fuel consumption.