The use of fossil fuels to sustain flight brings as a consequence two undesirable impacts for the aeronautic industry. Firstly, the pollution released to the atmosphere and secondly, the cost associated to fossil fuel. For these two main reasons, it is desirable to reduce the fossil fuel required to perform a flight since it directly impacts both: the pollution released to the atmosphere and the flight cost. An interesting way to achieve fuel reduction is to develop algorithms able to provide the most economical trajectory of reference. This alternative brings as a result the most economical flight in terms of fuel burn without the need of performing any structural modification to the aircraft. In this paper such an algorithm was developed inspired in the Dijkstra's algorithm in a weight dynamic graph. The algorithm simultaneously optimizes the lateral and the vertical trajectories of reference. The search space was modeled as a graph where the weather information was dynamically obtained for each waypoint The aircraft performance was modeled under the form of a numerical database obtained using experimental flight data. The trajectory of reference was simultaneously optimized for the lateral and the vertical dimensions. Results showed that up to 6% of fuel burn and 4% of flight cost can be saved comparing the algorithm's reference trajectory against great circle trajectories.
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