An Intelligent Flight Data Monitoring Software Tool For Aviation Education
The main aim of this project is to undertake research and development into an intelligent Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) software tool for use in aviation teaching and research. The proposed FDM tool is able to identify adverse trends and deviations from accepted norms of flight operations and safety.
Computational Intelligence-based algorithms (a branch of Artificial Intelligence, or AI) will be designed and developed to analyse and classify flight data and to deduce useful conclusions. In addition to providing early warning signals, the proposed FDM tool is able to provide explanation using the If-Then rule format to domain users why their flight operations are considered safe or unsafe.
The outcome, i.e., the intelligent FDM software tool, can be used as a Computer-Aided Learning (CAL) tool for aviation students to learn and understand flight navigation and safety issues, as well as a data mining tool for researchers to analyse flight data and perform flight operations analysis and assurance.
The key feature of the intelligent FDM tool is its ability to incrementally learn and absorb knowledge (flight operations by aviation students with the corresponding evaluation (safe or unsafe flight operations) by aviation instructors/trainers) into its knowledge base. In other words, the FDM tool is able to carry on learning in situ while providing useful predictions pertaining to flight operations after its development phase. As such, transfer of technology from software developers to domain users (aviation students and instructors/trainers) takes place, and control of the FDM tool is placed in the hand of the stakeholders after this project, making it a sustainable software tool for aviation education purposes.
References
[1] Thatcher, S. Jain, L. And C. Fyfe, C., An Intelligent Aircraft Landing Support System, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. LNAI 3213, Springer-Verlag, 2004, pp.74-79.
[2] Thatcher, S.J., Jain, L. and Fyfe, C. (2006), An Intelligent Aircraft Landing Support Paradigm, Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Symposium on Aviation Psychology. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma pp 741-746.
[3] Thatcher, S., Reducing Aircraft Accidents: Can Intelligent Agent Paradigms Help?, Proc. International Conference on Advanced Computer Theory and Engineering (ICACTE 2008), Phuket, Thailand, 19-23 December 2008, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 13-18, 2008.