Parallel optimal control algorithms for aircraft

Although optimal control techniques provide, in theory, the ability to design suitable control strategies for general control problems, in practice the results are not commonly implemented due to the large computational requirements for solving such problems. A recent development in computer systems has been the use of parallel processing techniques to speed up computations by sharing the work load over several processors that can interact between each other for message passing, sharing variables etc. In particular the advent of the INMOS transputer with its unique serial links have opened the doors to true parallelism in computer systems and much applications research is currently underway that is aimed at using transputer arrays. An area of interest to the authors is automatic flight control, which could also benefit from the introduction of parallel processing. In the paper the authors present two parallel optimal control algorithms for aircraft systems