WeatherMan: A Novel Mission Planning Tool Using Gridded Weather Ensemble Forecasting data

ABSTRACT:With the successful integration of operational weather data from multiple regional datasets by the Air Force, innovative ways are in urgent needs to leverage the data for decision makers at all echelons. Intelligent Automation Inc. (IAI), together with its academic partner, proposes to build a novel mission planning tool considering weather impacts for the Air Force. The key innovation is to formulate a mission planning optimization problem, constrained by probabilistic weather forecasts with uncertainties and other conventional variables, and provide a Receding Horizon (RH)-field D* based solution to achieve optimal mission success rates. The optimality of the mission is evaluated on metrics combining both weather related operational risk and other critical factors such as execution time, route distance, and fuel consumption. The proposed solutions will be implemented in a multi-layer fashion and based on a state-of-the-art data analytics platform at IAI. The designed system will also satisfy the generic demands of weather impact support from different program of records such as the Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS).BENEFIT:WeatherMan has significant commercial potential for applications such as aviation hazard mitigation, air traffic management, UAV path planning, transportation planning, and disaster relief and recovery. For example, the small UAV market sector alone is estimated to reach $1.33bn in 2014 with significant potential for growth, where path planning regarding weather has great applications in this market to improve the aviation safety. End users of WeatherMan include Airline companies (e.g. American Airline), UAV delivery (e.g. Amazon), and International NGOs (e.g. International Relief and Development). IAI has contacts within each of these organizations and will actively engage them during the program to generate interest in WeatherMan.