Optimal Trajectory Generation for Multiple Aircraft in Formation Flight

Trajectory optimization is a field of study in the aeronautical domain that has experienced a significant surge in interest over the past decades, both in civil and military applications. It represents an optimal control problem aimed at identifying the controls and the corresponding trajectory to achieve an objective while satisfying certain constraints. The objective of this thesis is to develop a bilevel algorithm capable of optimizing the trajectories of multiple aircraft F104 in formation flight, each represented by a 3 DOF point mass model. The identified trajectories must meet predefined waypoints for each aircraft, which are established by the user prior to the start of the optimization process. The results presented in this thesis demonstrate the algorithm’s capability in achieving the various objectives at the two levels into which the algorithm itself is divided, as well as in assessing the physical feasibility of the final trajectory by showing the time evolution of both the states and the controls for all the aircraft involved. This thesis also highlights the flexibility of the developed code in being applied to different models, though with a varying computational cost, which strongly depends on the complexity of the model.