Abstract Effectively improving flight fuel efficiency and optimising operational management while ensuring environmentally sustainable and safe operations is crucial for the global aviation to achieve a successful sustainability transition. Addressing the imperative shift from conventional air traffic flow management (ATFM) to trajectory-based operation (TBO), this paper proposes a large-scale flight trajectory optimisation framework under TBO. The study integrates influencing factors including meteorological conditions, airspace capacity and aircraft performance. With the assistance of an air traffic operation simulation system, flight characteristic information is extracted to construct the optimisation model. The model addresses a multi-objective optimisation problem, balancing sector excess traffic flow against cruise fuel consumption within a priority-based framework, to generate global flight plans with optimal altitude profile and waypoint overflight times. Experiment in Chinese airspace shows the TBO scenario achieves substantial reductions of 66.0% in excess sector traffic and 7.8% in cruise fuel consumption versus baseline scenario. This provides a methodological framework for airspace resource allocation supporting energy conservation and emission reduction.
Yang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.