An Ontology for Aircraft Route Planning

An amount of methods used in route planning (RP) for aircraft have emerged during the last few years. It is difficult to master these methods and make a fast choice to use among them, which results from the lack of domain knowledge representation and reuse of RP. To achieve the domain knowledge reuse and efficient planning process, an ontology defined by Web ontology language (OWL) for RP dubbed ONTRP is developed to specify the domain knowledge and fill the gap between conceptual modeling of RP and software implementation of it. ONTRP can help people who lack experience on RP make an analysis and comparison between two RP algorithms by means of automatic reasoning and establish the models for RP efficiently. Despite a number of simplifications in ONTRP, it is the first conceptual model of RP problem established by ontology as well as the first attempt to dig for common knowledge in RP problem for the sake of reuse.