Architectural Design of a Future Flight Management System Supporting 4D Trajectories

While worldwide air traffic keeps growing, the involved stakeholders, especially aircraft operators, are faced with several challenges. Ecological goals are imposed by governments and society, fierce competition demands increasing efficiency to stay profitable and passengers expect a raise in quality of service. Additionally, the growth of air traffic pushes the capacities of airspace and airports to its limits. Initiatives put into work by nations and unions are developing and implementing operational concepts and supporting technology to overcome these issues. An enabling concept to increase capacity are Trajectory Based Operations, which are only supported to a limited extent by traditional Flight Management Systems. This thesis contributes a possible system architecture of a Trajectory Execution and Optimization System, that is intended to replace traditional Flight Management Systems. The proposed architecture supports planned future flight operations and, at the same time, allows airlines to increase their overall operational efficiency. This is achieved by redistributing functionality of the traditional Flight Management System onto an Operationally Approved device and a certified system. The certified system, labeled CoreFMS, is responsible for executing trajectories, while trajectory planning and optimization functions reside on the Operationally Approved device. A fileserver onboard the aircraft connects the two entities, where the fileserver additionally is connected to the airline's operations center. Means of establishing safe and secure connections between the two entities were developed in this thesis, as well as an assessment of the system's certifiability. In order to showcase the benefits of the proposed architecture, a demonstrator was developed and implemented into a research flight simulator at TU Darmstadt. A usability study was conducted to evaluate the applicability of the proposed system architecture. Commercially rated pilots conducted a task comprising of route planning and activation, using both the system demonstrator as well as a traditional Flight Management System in the research flight simulator. The results of the trials point to a confirmation of the usability of the architecture. Compared to the traditional Flight Management System the Trajectory Execution and Optimization System received higher usability ratings. The participants experience of working with the traditional Flight Management System varied. A trajectory optimization algorithm, intended to be deployed on the Operationally Approved device, was developed and evaluated. While the evaluation proved the feasibility of a trajectory optimization imposed with time constraints, the need for precise constraint determination was shown by a considerable amount of unsuccessful optimizations. Also, high computation times call for a target hardware and computation speed oriented implementation of such algorithms