Use cases

Complete-flight planning

Optimize climb, cruise, descent, and arrival in one trajectory.

Phase optimization

Focus on climb, cruise, or descent as a separate problem.

Real-flight replay

Compare observed tracks with optimized alternatives.

Grid and climate studies

Evaluate contrails, weather, airspace, or custom costs.

Robust candidate search

Compare solutions from varied initial trajectory guesses.

Components

Aircraft and loading

Type, engine, mass, payload, and fuel capacity.

Route and phase scope

Airports or lat/lon endpoints; complete flight or one phase.

Performance model

OpenAP, BADA3, or BADA4 aircraft envelopes.

Objectives and limits

Fuel, time, cost index, climate, maximum fuel, fixed profiles.

Atmosphere and wind

Wind fields, timing, and temperature shift.

Cost-grid context

3D/4D fields for climate, weather, or airspace penalties.

Optimization engine

Searches for a feasible trajectory that minimizes the selected operational goal.


Decision variables

  • where the aircraft flies
  • how high it flies
  • how fast and in what direction
  • how long the flight takes
  • how fuel and mass evolve

Feasibility checks

  • aircraft performance envelopes
  • thrust, drag, and energy limits
  • smooth speed and climb-rate changes
  • fuel capacity and mass constraints
  • heading and phase behavior
physically constrained trajectory

Outputs

Optimized trajectory

Position, altitude, speed, heading, mass, and time history.

Fuel and cost accounting

Fuel burn, per-segment fuel cost, and optional grid cost.

Objective summary

Selected goal, objective value, and trade-off comparison.

Diagnostics

Solver status, iterations, and multi-start candidate ranking.

Reusable artifacts

Tables, structured result object, parquet export, trajectory plots.