Designing Routes in Terminal Maneuvering Area Using Hybrid Simulated Annealing

To ensure the safe and efficient operation of flights in terminal maneuvering areas, airports establish standard arrival and departure procedures. However, designing these procedures is typically time-consuming and challenging for quantitative path length optimization. This paper presents an efficient optimization method for designing multiple arrival and departure procedures, taking into account the configuration of the airport and the nearby environment. The objective is to minimize the total length of routes while satisfying related operational constraints, such as obstacle avoidance and route separation. Each route is modeled in three dimensions, consisting of a horizontal polygonal line and a vertical cone. Considering the actual procedures’ merging or diverging configuration characteristics, multiple arrival or departure routes are then modeled as a tree-like topology structure. A hybrid algorithm, integrating simulated annealing and an improved [Formula: see text] algorithm, is developed for automated problem-solving. Simulation results, based on tests at Sweden’s Arlanda Airport, exhibit advantages over existing related research in terms of both total route length and computing time. Tests at Shanghai Pudong Airport show an 8% reduction in total path length compared to actual procedures, demonstrating the proposed method’s effectiveness and potential contributions to energy savings and emissions reduction.