Hierarchical and sensitivity analysis for noise abatement departure procedures

Abstract

Nowadays, the establishment of new noise abatement procedures is one of the main issues that airport authorities have to address. As a continuation of previous studies, the authors present in this paper a strategy for designing such procedures aimed at reducing the global annoyance perceived for the population living around the airports. Noise optimal departing routes are computed for a specific aircraft type and for a given scenario. This non-linear multi-objective optimal control problem is solved by using lexicographic and hierarchical optimisation techniques. This approach establishes a hierarchical order among all the optimisation objectives, which in this work are set as the maximum perceived noise levels at different noise sensitive locations. If the prioritisation that should be adopted is not clear, this work presents two techniques aimed at obtaining the best solution according to an equitable principle, based on minimising the worst case noise annoyance. First approach requires a high computational cost, but the best trajectory is obtained, being the opposite case for the second technique, which is based on heuristics.