Global optimization approaches to an aircraft routing problem

We describe a global optimization problem which arises in the calculation of flight paths and discuss the performance of a number of recently proposed solution algo-rithms when applied to some demonstration examples. In particular we compare a deterministic approach (DIRECT) with two others (TSHJ and ECTS) which use random searching. Numerical results show that, while all three techniques can sometimes be successful, the deterministic method is generally more reliable for the type of problem we are concerned with