Providing a description of aircraft intent

Abstract

The present invention provides a computer-implemented method of generating an aircraft intent description expressed in a formal language that provides an unambiguous four-dimensional description of an aircraft's intended motion and configuration during a period of flight. A flight intent description is parsed to provide instances of flight intent that span a flight segment, the flight segments together spanning the period of flight. The parsed flight intent is enriched with objectives and constraints according to user preferences, operational context and aircraft performance. The resulting enriched flight intent is converted into a parametric aircraft intent description by ensuring that each flight segment closes all associated degrees of freedom of motion and of configuration of the aircraft. At least some instances of aircraft intent contain a parameter range, and the method further comprises optimizing the parametric aircraft intent by determining an optimal value for the parameter of each parameter range.