Patent ID: 8798813

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, the instances of flight intent spanning a flight segment with the flight segments together spanning the period of flight; for a flight segment, generating an associated flight segment description that comprises one or more instances of flight intent, wherein the one or more instances of flight intent provide a description of the aircraft's motion in at least one degree of freedom of motion thereby closing the associated at least one degree of freedom of motion and/or provides a description of the aircraft's configuration to close at least one degree of freedom of configuration; comparing flight segment descriptions with constraints and/or objectives stored in a database and identifying constraints and/or objectives that are relevant to the flight segment description; enriching the flight segment descriptions with information describing identified constraints and/or objectives relevant to the flight segment description thereby providing an enriched flight intent; and checking that the aircraft intent meets one or more constraints pertaining to the aircraft and, if not, returning to the parsed flight intent description derived from the obtained flight intent, identifying flight segments where not all degrees of freedom are closed and completing the identified flight segments, selecting an alternative strategy from a plurality of stored strategies and adding an instance of flight intent corresponding to that strategy to close all degrees of freedom, collating the flight segment descriptions thereby providing an alternative description of aircraft intent for the period of flight expressed in a formal language, and repeating the step of checking that the aircraft intent meets one or more constraints pertaining to the aircraft.