A Model Predictive Control Scheme for Flight Scheduling and Energy Management of Electric Aviation Networks

This paper presents a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme for flight scheduling and energy management of electric aviation networks, where electric aircraft transport passengers between electrified airports equipped with sustainable energy sources and battery storage, with the goal of minimizing grid dependency. Specifically, we first model the aircraft flight and charge scheduling problem jointly with the airport energy management problem, explicitly accounting for local weather forecasts. Second, we frame the minimum-grid-energy operational problem as a mixed-integer linear program and solve it in a receding horizon fashion, where the route assignment and charging decisions of each aircraft can be dynamically reassigned to mitigate disruptions. We showcase the proposed MPC scheme on real-world data taken from conventional flights and weather conditions in the Dutch Leeward Antilles. Our results show that MPC can effectively guarantee operation of the network by efficiently re-assigning flights and rescheduling aircraft charging, whilst maximizing the efficiency of the on-site energy systems.