Toward Smarter Autoflight Control System Infrastructure

Abstract

The Internet of Flying Things and related emerging technologies, such as the System-Wide Information Management Infrastructure of the Federal Aviation Administration NextGen program, present numerous opportunities for the aviation sector. The ubiquity of aeronautical, flight, weather, aerodrome, and maintenance data accelerates the development of smarter software systems to cope with the ever-increasing requirements of the industry sector. We describe the evolving infrastructure of our Smart Autoflight Control System as a self-adaptive autonomic system. The Smart Autoflight Control System shall monitor, analyze, plan, and execute airborne missions continuously. Decision making and support regarding computed flight trajectories is going to involve the interaction with human actors in the loop. Our system shall ultimately assess and improve its own performance in computing trajectories employing a continuous selection and tuning of planning environments and applicable algorithms.