Grant: Alliance Grants

The aviation industry is vitally important to the Canadian economy, and Canada is globally recognized for its aerospace expertise. Flight planning is a critical component of aviation, ensuring safety, fuel efficiency, and regulatory compliance. A comprehensive flight plan covers the entire journey and considers factors such as weather, fuel efficiency, regulatory adherence, timing, and emergency preparedness. Major airlines, like Air Canada, generate hundreds of flight plans daily. However, the increasing complexity of airspace restrictions, driven by rising global passenger traffic, enhanced security measures, military conflicts, national security events, and extreme weather, necessitates the development of more scalable flight planning solutions. The proposed research will focus on two aspects of flight operations: 1) Engine Failure Procedures (EFPs) for emergency preparedness, and 2) route planning subject to airspace restrictions. EFPs are a vital part of aviation safety systems, ensuring that an aircraft can take off even if an engine were to fail on the runway, climb out, and safely return to the airport while avoiding terrain and obstacles. Effective route planning is necessary to optimize and accurately predict the fuel consumed by each aircraft, taking into consideration the current weather and wind conditions, airspace restrictions, and legal requirements. This partnership aims to develop efficient, scalable methods for flight planning using optimization and search-based techniques for both EFP generation and route planning. These methods will be fully automated and capable of handling thousands of flights daily. Together, they will address the need to adapt to unforeseen disruptions while minimizing operational changes and the costs associated with such disruptions.