Fast Marching Tree applied to geodesic trajectories in presence of uncertain wind: a day of flights in Europe study

This paper addresses the generation of aircraft cruise optimal trajectories in the presence of wind using the FMT* algorithm. Proven efficient in robotics, it is adapted to take account of wind and great-circle distances. After presenting the problem handled, the adaptation of the algorithm to solve it is presented. In particular, how to deal with great circle distances without increasing too much the computation time is detailed. The proposed method is evaluated on benchmarks and is shown as appropriate to solve this problem. A case study on European flights is also given. This case study shows that this method obtains good results on most European origin-destination pairs. Uncertainties are then considered and tested on a transatlantic flight case. This work is a preliminary work to show that FMT* can be used for aircraft cruise trajectories planning in the presence of wind.