Development of multiobjective trajectory-optimization method and its application to improve aircraft landing

The objective of this study is to develop a trajectory-optimization method using an efficient time-series flight simulation. Equations of motion (EoMs) were solved by estimating the time-series aerodynamics data construction. The aerodynamics of an arbitrary aircraft were estimated according to an aerodynamic database, which improved the efficiency via the Kriging method. To increase the accuracies of aerodynamic databases, additional data sets were acquired. The developed method was applied to the multi-objective problem of trajectory optimization for landing approaches. Two objective functions were considered: the minimization of the cost function, which indicates the optimal profile trajectory, and the minimization of the maximum acceleration. A Kriging model-based exploration with non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II was used as an optimizer. According to the results, as well as a comparison of the cases with and without the microburst effect, the microburst effect can potentially cause an overestimation of the aircraft trajectory by minimizing both the cost function and the maximum acceleration. The trajectory thus needs to be corrected to the nearest trajectory without a microburst effect, with optimal control angle and altitude. The trajectory optimization was affected by the initial sampling and additional samples of the aerodynamic database. This study shows the importance of this database for optimizing the trajectory analysis on the basis of the equation of motion.