Patent ID: 8744649

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of generating a description of aircraft intent expressed in a formal language that provides an unambiguous description of an aircraft's intended motion and configuration during a period of flight, comprising: obtaining a description of flight intent corresponding to a flight plan spanning the period of flight; ensuring that the flight intent description is parsed to provide instances of flight intent, each instance of flight intent spanning a flight segment with the flight segments together spanning the period of flight; converting the parsed flight intent into parametric aircraft intent by generating an associated flight segment description for each flight segment that comprises instances of flight intent to close all associated degrees of freedom of motion and of configuration of the aircraft during the flight segment, wherein each instance of flight intent provides a description of the aircraft's motion in at least one degree of freedom of motion thereby closing the associated degree of freedom of motion and/or a description of the aircraft's configuration to close at least one degree of freedom of configuration, and wherein at least some flight segment descriptions contain a parameter range; and wherein the method further comprises optimising the parametric aircraft intent by determining an optimal value for the parameter of each parameter range.