Coursework
Fuel-Optimal Cruise Trajectory Optimization
A physics-based model of aircraft dynamics, fuel burn and wind, serving as a baseline against data-driven approaches.
A physics-based trajectory optimization framework for fuel-optimal cruise flight planning that explicitly models aircraft dynamics, fuel consumption and meteorological wind effects, used as a baseline for comparison against data-driven approaches.
The problem is posed as a nonlinear constrained optimization over a fixed-altitude cruise segment with multiple intermediate waypoints. Decision variables are the Mach number profile, the heading profile, and waypoint passage times; aircraft state evolves in continuous time while controls are discretised into K segments.