📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

Despite being considered a hard-to-abate sector, aviation's emissions will play an important role in long-term climate mitigation of transportation. The introduction of low-carbon energy carriers and the deployment of new aircraft in the current fleet are modeled as technology-centered decarbonization policies, while supply constraints in targeted market segments are modeled as demand-side policies. Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are used to estimate trend traffic demand and to limit the sectoral consumption of electricity and biomass. Mitigation scenarios are formulated as optimization problems, and three applications are demonstrated: no-policy baselines, single-policy optimization, and scenario-robust policies. Results show that the choice of energy carrier is highly dependent on assumptions regarding aircraft technology and the background energy system. Across all SSP-based scenarios, emissions peak by around 2040, but achieving alignment with the Paris Agreement requires either targeted demand management or additional low-carbon energy supply. The use of gradient-based optimization within a multidisciplinary framework enables the efficient resolution of these nonlinear, high-dimensional problems while reducing implementation effort.