Route planning

Route planning is discussed as part of an avionics system. A very rapid route planning technique was developed based on the cellular automata (CA) paradigm. A CA consists of a 2-D, 3-D or higher-dimensional grid of cells. Each cell has either a real or virtual processor assigned to it, and communicates with neighboring cells to solve a variety of spatial-temporal problems. The route planner operates within a multidimensional cellular search space where there is a cost associated with travel through every cell. This cost is a weighted combination of many factors. To provide a dynamically adaptable level of resolution appropriate to the problem under consideration, a quadtree-based technique was developed. The basic route planning algorithm extends very naturally into the time dimension