Paul Tomblin wrote:

In a previous article, Kyler Laird said:

Here's a simple-minded algorithm with lots of holes to fill.

Provide start and end airports and altitude
restrictions.

Get started with a standard departure or create one.

Use preferred route or create one using least cost
(mileage) routing. There are 20,757 airways.

Finish using a standard approach or create one.

So...suggestions?


I started playing around with this idea years ago before when I was going
to write an on-line flight planner. (That was an idea I started work on
and then abandoned, and then a year or two later when I discovered CoPilot
I decided that this was a better use of all the FAA data I had collected.)

What I thought I'd do for the first cut at the algorithm was:
Find every VOR that's within "X" degrees of a straight line between
the start and end

At that VOR

- Find every VOR that's within "X" degrees of a straight line between
that VOR and the end point.

- Continue iterating until there are no VORs between you and the end
point.

When you have all your candidate routes, throw away any that don't
have airways between the VOR. Maybe make an exception if the distance is
less than "Y". Sort from shortest to longest.

Obviously that needs some work to handle DPs and STARs and preferred
routes.

I'd think some of the approaches taught in any good operations research
course would be much better. It's been 20+ years since I took my last
OR course, but I'd look into a good OR text before writing code. There
a much better methods than a brute force, exhaustive search approach.


Matt