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Providing data for predicting aircraft trajectory

  • US 9,153,136 B2
  • Filed: 01/27/2012
  • Issued: 10/06/2015
  • Est. Priority Date: 01/28/2011
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. A method, implemented by a computational infrastructure, of providing a description of a flight intent of an aircraft to be flown on a flight expressed using a formal language, the method comprising:

  • receiving at an input of the computational infrastructure information describing how the aircraft is to be flown including motion information that describes the motion of the aircraft and configuration information that describes an aerodynamic configuration of the aircraft, and storing the information in a database;

    dividing, by the computational infrastructure, the flight onto one or more flight segments having one or more constraints and one or more objectives, wherein the one or more flight segments represent an intent of changing an aircraft motion state from one state into another, the one or more constraints represent a restriction on a trajectory of the aircraft, and the one or more objectives represent a desire relating to the trajectory to maximize or minimize a certain function;

    for each flight segment following, by the computational infrastructure, a set of rules, using the computational infrastructure, that govern the creation of valid words using the flight segment, the one or more constraints for the flight segment, and the one or more objectives for the flight segment to express the flight intent using a formal language made up of the valid words which defines which degrees of freedom of motion of the aircraft are defined during the flight segment and which degrees of freedom of motion are not defined during the flight segment;

    for each flight segment following, by the computational infrastructure, a set of attributes, being an effect, an execution interval, and a flight segment code that govern the creation of the valid words, the effect comprising aircraft behavior exhibited during the flight segment represented by a composite, the execution interval defining an interval during which the flight segment is active defining an initial aircraft state and a final aircraft state, and the flight segment code comprising an alphanumeric string wherein each letter or number in the alphanumeric string represents one of the degrees of freedom of the motion of the aircraft; and

    transmitting the flight intent of the aircraft using the formal language to the aircraft, to another aircraft, or to an air traffic manager.

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