Sensitivity analysis of aviation environmental impacts for the base of aircraft data (Bada) family 4

The Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT) is a comprehensive software package that estimates aviation environmental impacts and provides quantitative evidences for policy makers to assess new operational procedures and policy scenarios. In AEDT’s aircraft performance modeling and simulation, the recent addition of Base of Aircraft Data (BADA) family 4 methods and data raised AEDT’s functional and fidelity capability to a new level. Meanwhile, the implementation of BADA4 models also brought additional needs for an uncertainty quantification effort in order to better understand the main contributors to AEDT output variations under BADA4, and inform developers about future enhancement directions for AEDT performance. In this paper we present the first stage of the uncertainty quantification effort on BADA4. First, the uncertainty characterization step identifies and mathematically representing the uncertain parameters, including BADA4 model coefficients and physical/operational parameters. Subsequently, a sensitivity analysis quantifies the impacts of physical/operational uncertainties on key AEDT outputs. Through the result analysis, it is found out that the physical and operational uncertainties have significant impact on the estimation of key environmental metrics.