Hardt, Michael (Boeing Research & Technology - Europe), Hoepler, Robert (Technische Hochschule Rosenheim)

Generating Aircraft Trajectories Encoded with the Aircraft Intent Description Language Using the Modeling Language Modelica

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Trajectory planning" (WeA1), Wednesday, April 3, 2019, 15:30−16:00, Carassa-Dadda

5th CEAS Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control, April 3-5, 2019, Milano, Italy

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 18, 2024

Abstract

The integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into civil, non-segregated airspace remains an open problem for which many distinct proposals have been made. One of the fundamental ingredients for a viable system is the facilitation of the communication of an aircraft's trajectory among the airspace stakeholders so as to introduce a necessary degree of predictability into the system. This is essential for the coordination of aircraft in a densely populated airspace and, in particular, to be prepared for potential time-critical contingencies. The Aircraft Intent Description Language (AIDL) has been proposed in the past to efficiently represent an aircraft's trajectory. It consists of describing the aircraft's flight intent into several parallel sequences of instructions, which are intuitive and easily interpretable, and can be translated into a high resolution flight trajectory which takes into account the aircraft performance model and environmental conditions. The benefits of this representation is that its information content is minimal suitable for reduced bandwidth communications, and it is independent of the aircraft's performance model and environmental conditions, both of which may vary over time, or for which certain stakeholders may later dispose of improved information. Nevertheless, a potential hindrance in the implementation of this trajectory representation consists in the trajectory reconstruction process. A system of differential-algebraic equations (DAE) of possibly high index must be solved. Numerical tools to date have required the consideration of numerous special use cases such as to condition the numerical solution problem accordingly. This paper presents a generic approach by which this trajectory reconstruction process is performed making use of the object-oriented modeling language Modelica and associated tools. Efficient embeddable code can then be generated from this environment for UAS. It is considered that these techniques can be an important enabler to permit a wide sector to fully take advantage of the numerous advantages that this description language offers.