Reasonably Optimal Utilisation Through Evolution (ROUTE) in Airspace Design

The underlying navigation technology that enables the navigation of aircraft through airspace is improving, allowing aircraft to navigate waypoints that do not need to be previously defined, no longer being confined to antiquated navigational aids. From this the opportunity is arising to create highly optimized airspace that can change its design on the fly in reaction to the environment. This paper presents a novel approach towards route finding in airspace design using computational evolution. The proposed method, ROUTE, can create new airspace designs in reaction to changing environmental constraints, optimising for fuel burn (therefore cost and emissions) as well as noise disturbance, and route length.