Integrated arrival and departure weather avoidance routing within extended terminal airspace

Analysis of historical trajectories showed that when weather is impacting terminal operations, it is common for flights to deviate from published routes, even to the extent of using departure airspace for arrivals. This demonstrates that more flexible routing is needed in terminal airspace, especially when there are weather constraints. In this paper, we present an algorithm for the integrated design of dynamic arrival and departure weather avoidance routing within extended terminal airspace. This algorithm can serve as a strategic planning tool to aid air traffic controllers in managing terminal operations during weather events. Due to safety and efficiency considerations, arrival route structures are first designed and then modeled as constraints when designing the departure routes. The algorithm combines trajectory optimization with heuristics and takes into account human factors constraints, such as distance between merge points and number of merging flows per merge point. We demonstrate through fast-time simulation that dynamic weather avoidance routing can improve terminal operation efficiencies.