Flight Management Systems for All-Electric Aircraft

Recent years have marked a significant step forward in the development of all-electric airplanes, some of which have been built and tested recently. This paper proposes an optimal control framework for flight management systems of all-electric aircraft. The optimal control problems of economy mode and maximum endurance will be solved using Pontryagin's minimum principle. The economy mode optimization problem corresponds to the minimization of a functional parameterized by a coefficient index that performs a trade-off between the cost of the battery charge and time-related costs. The speed for maximum endurance, the maximum endurance and the maximum range were obtained as analytical solutions of the parameters. However, the speed for maximum range and the speed for economy mode are the positive real roots of a polynomial equation of order eight, which can easily be obtained numerically. The Airbus E-Fan 1.0 model is used to obtain numerical results and validate the optimal solutions.