Severe weather avoidance using informed heuristic search
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abstract
Severe weather conditions pose a large threat to the safety of airplanes. For general aviation aircraft, the only permissible action when a thunderstorm is in the flight path is to detour around the thunderstorm. In this paper, an algorithm is developed for general aviation aircraft, which takes a radar image of the thunderstorm as the input, and determines the safest path around with minimum detour. The method used is A search with modification. A search is an informed search technique which makes use of an evaluation function that determines the total path cost for any given point. The evaluation function is composed of the actual path cost and a heuristic function to give the estimated cost of the remaining path. In this paper, a heuristic function is formulated which gives a measure of the detour and also addresses the constraints imposed by the desirability of the path. An algorithm for A * search using the heuristic function is developed, and used to determine the flight path in some sample cases. Test cases of stationary and moving thunderstorms show the method to be reliable and fast. 2001 by S. Bokadia and J. Valasek.
name of conference
AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference and Exhibit
