Flight planning software minimization algorithm

On Feb 24, 6:59 pm, "Andrew Sarangan" wrote:
Most of the software out there will compute a flight based on the
user's route, time of departure and altitude. This is a fairly
straight forward task which could be done without a computer, as has
been the case for decades.

What I am looking for is the reverse. Given a destination, aircraft
type and a window of travel time (which could be a couple of days),
the software should come up with the best altitude, route and time of
departure. It should consider forecasted winds aloft, frontal
positions, icing potentials, turbulence and thunderstorms. The user
should be able to attach numeric weights to indicate the level of
importance to each factor. In other words, it should be a minimization
software considering a variety of decision matrix. At present I do
this by recomputing the flight for each scenario. This does get very
cumbersome, and is best done with an automated algorithm. If such a
thing exists, I would like to hear opinions.

Hi Andrew,

I have actually been considering making such an algorithm for my
shareware flight planner, AirPlan. When I get some time to delve into
it, I think I am going to work on it. The biggest challenge is
getting it to operate in a reasonable amount of time. Even on a multi-
Gigahertz speed PC, the number of permutations that have to be
investigated by the software algorithm are huge, especially for a
destination that is very far away...

Dean