In this Flight Quest, you are tasked with creating algorithms to generate optimal flight plans (routes) given a flight's origin and destination airports, current air traffic conditions, and weather information.
Each route, represented as a series of points (latitude and longitude) with airspeed and altitude, will be evaluated against the Cost Function.
The Cost Function, a measure of the relative cost in dollars of the flight given a submitted flight plan, seeks to quantitatively capture the direct and indirect costs of flights, and is defined as
$$\textrm{Cost} = f \textrm{F} + t(D_\textrm{crew} + D_\textrm{other}) + D_\textrm{pass}(t) $$
where
F
is the quantity of fuel burned in gallons,
f
is the per-gallon fuel cost,
t
is the time in flight in hours, and the remaining terms are hourly cost rates related to crew, passenger and overhead costs. The exact parameterization of the Cost function will be available in the Simulator documentation.