The paper first investigates the influence of daily mobility of population on evaluation of aircraft noise effects. Then, a new air traffic assignment model that considers this activity is proposed. The main objective is to reduce the number of people affected by noise via lowering as much as possible the noise exposure level L _den of individuals or groups of people who commute to the same locations during the day. It is hereby intended to reduce the noise impact upon individuals rather than to reduce the impact in particular – typically densely populated – areas. However, sending aircraft farther away from populated regions to reduce noise impact may increase fuel burn, thus affecting airline costs and sustainability. Therefore, a multi-objective optimization approach is utilized to obtain reasonable solutions that comply with overall air transport sustainability. The method aims at generating a set of solutions that provide proper balance between noise annoyance and fuel consumption. The reliability and applicability of the proposed method are validated through a real case study at Belgrade airport in Serbia. The investigation shows that there is a difference between the number of people annoyed (NPA) evaluated based on the census data and the NPA evaluated based on the mobility data. In addition, these numbers differ significantly across residential locations. The optimal results show that the proposed model can offer a considerable reduction in the NPA, and in some cases, it can gain up to 77%, while maintaining the same level of fuel consumption compared with the reference case.

Air traffic assignment to departure and arrival routes has a major impact on the population noise exposure in the vicinity of the airport. In some cases, by choosing the suitable air traffic assignment it is possible to avoid overflying populated areas and reduce number of people affected by noise. However, such an approach almost always leads to an increase in route length, and therefore an increase in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Although aircraft noise and fuel consumption reduction are conflicting goals, they both represent pivotal aspects of air transport sustainable development. In this paper, the methods of multi-criteria optimisation are applied, which are generally used when it is necessary to make an optimal decision that requires a compromise (trade-off) solution between two or more conflicting goals. This research aims to develop a mathematical model and to propose an algorithm for air traffic assignment to departure and arrival routes that will, through the Pareto optimality concept, find the approximation of a set of nondominated solutions that minimize population noise exposure and fuel consumption. The approach was demonstrated on Belgrade airport to show the benefits of the proposed model on a real data example. Since all Pareto optimal solutions are considered equally good, from all obtained air traffic assignments, the three representative solutions were compared to the actual air traffic assignment (Base case). The obtained results indicate that the proposed approach can provide solutions which offer a good trade-off between the concerned metrics.