Accounting for the effect of ground delay on commercial formation flight

Abstract

This paper explores the impact ground delay can have on designing and executing rendezvous operations such as formation flight. For a given formation pairing the route is fixed, speed policies are then generated to compensate for uncertainty in take-off times. Value Iteration is used to solve both the deterministic and stochastic Dynamic Programming problem for an entire state-space. The final optimal policies determine what course of action aircraft should take for any realization of delay. Finally a comparative case study shows that even with delay, formation flights can reach expected savings of 6.1% against flying solo.