An Expert System For Navigation in Hazardous Weather Conditions: Pilot Weather Advisor
Shashi Seth, Binyun Xie, Richa Garg, Lynne Maree D'Cruz · 1993
In an effort to combine navigation, and in flight weather information to evolve a total flight management system, we are tackling with the issues of providing usable information to the pilot in the cockpit of aircraft. We are currently involved in the design and development of such a system, called the Pilot Weather Advisor. This paper describes the research effort directed towards the development of an Expert System to help pilots navigate in hazardous weather condition. The expert system advises on paths outside of any hazardous regions, automatically detected by analysis of radar and surface observations along the flight path of the aircraft. This problem can be visualized as a robot navigation problem in 2-D, with the aircraft as the robot and the radar areas as objects. Several robot navigation algorithms lend themselves normally to this problem. These include the VGRAPH algorithm and the A* Algorithm. We have provided an overview of applying a combination of these algorithms to our problem. We also discuss the idea of representing our knowledge-base of Visual Flying Rules (VFR) and Instrument Flying Rules (IFR) by embedding it within 'hypertext'.