SID and STAR routes optimization near large airports

International audienceIn the current state of Air Traffic Management, procedures design is a difficult task carried out by hand by procedure designers. The current growth of air traffic imposes to find more efficient ways to direct aircraft across the Terminal Maneuvering Area, which connects the en-route sector to the ground, to avoid congestion. In this paper, a solution to automatically design departure and arrival procedures is presented, which takes into account numerous constraints, including obstacles around the airport, limited slopes and turn angles and the necessity to not merge all routes at the same time. A route is represented as a horizontal path in a graph, associated to a cone of altitudes. The set of all routes is optimized using the Simulated Annealing metaheuristic. The algorithm has been tested on several instances, artificially created, taken from the literature or corresponding to real-life configurations. It is capable of taking into account several routes to design on several runways at the same time. The results are satisfactory regarding the current state of Air Traffic Management