Open Source Flight Planning Could Save Airlines Thousands in Jet Fuel
Saving Jet Fuel
A Boeing 787-9 flying from Newark to Rome burns $68K in jet fuel. By optimizing flight paths for wind, open source tools like Scikit-decide, OpenAP, and NOAA wind data can cut fuel consumption. Scikit-decide, a six-year-old reinforcement learning framework, also handles crew scheduling and drone swarm paths. A comparison of two Airbus A320 flight paths using OpenAP's fuel model shows the potential savings.
Adjusting the flight path for wind conditions could reduce fuel consumption and possibly save a few thousand dollars.
- buildsjets
This is the perfect route planning software if you are the only aircraft in the sky, and fuel is your only cost. The commercial solutions exist because they consider not only the winds and fuel costs in their optimization, but also known previously cleared ATC routings, altitude restrictions whether they are charted or only documented by letter-of-agreement, expected delays due to historical congestion, pilot and cabin crew pay, crew duty time limits (your more fuel efficient route may take longer and require an entire second crew), contracted lease, finance, insurance, and maintenance rates as these are also frequently paid by the the hour, and airport arrival curfew times. And probably a few more things too.
Also, you say nothing about incorporating ETOPS routing requirements into your application, and looking at the opentop source neither does it, therefore I assume this must mean this is the first time you have seen that acronym and therefore do not understand its criticality in determining aircraft routing. Might want to have your AI agent read this Wikipedia article, because your application generates many routes that are not legal to fly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
Should I even ask if this application routes around areas that have been declared active war zones by NOTAM?
- K0balt
I have a close family member who flys airliners. He routinely laments having to burn up thousands of pounds of fuel on the ramp to adjust changes to the landing weight projections by dispatch and from over fueling. The amount of waste in a single error (and they are not that infrequent) is enough to heat my house for a year… and I live within 200 miles of the arctic circle. I mean, burning 1000 gallons of fancy diesel once in a while is a rounding error for jetliner operations, but still, it’s absurd that that is the best solution.
- croemer
If you look at the "optimal" path here looks completely unrealistic/pathological. How is it optimal to zig zag like this? The grid is clearly too coarse and that's possibly not the only issue: https://tech.marksblogg.com/theme/images/flight_planning/msr...
- walrus01
I am not sure how this approach would integrate with the common use of navigating between known/mapped IFR navigation waypoints:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=IFR+navig...
- V-eHGsd_
and this would work in real life too, if only we could all climb and descend entirely at pilot's discretion, direct enter enter and never have to worry about all of the other planes doing the exact same thing.