A Demand-driven Flight Routing Method for Commercial Supersonic Aircraft Designs

Flight trajectory optimization is necessary to forecast the market potential of future supersonic aircraft designs. This paper presents a graph-based routing algorithm that accounts for aircraft transitions between subsonic and supersonic cruise. A post-processing procedure further refines the resulting time-optimal route based on user-defined limits on minimum overwater cruise distance and the maximum number of acceleration–deceleration cycles. Minimizing deviation from the direct route and balancing the estimated distances of the two flight segments serve as dual objectives for refueling stop selection. Candidate refueling airports are identified from the resulting Pareto front. A subsequent demand-driven algorithm selects the optimal refueling stop from a set of candidate airports. Demonstrations across multiple OD pairs indicate that this rapid and demand-driven approach can also reliably identify time-optimal flight paths for the traditional supersonic, high-supersonic, and low-boom designs, which enables designers to evaluate the market potential of a wide range of aircraft concepts with different mission performance requirements.