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It's a common opinion that in the 1990s combat aircraft a new generation of avionic systems with a more integrated hardware and software will take place, involving innovative software about signal processing, sensor fusion and especially expert system software to reduce pilot workload and to improve system performance. AI theories, methodologies and techniques seem to be generally adequate to these purposes, even for complex applications such as those of Pilot Assistance. In some cases, it is not completely clear yet, if the state of the art in this technology is adequate to meet the needs of such a complex project, and we are still in a phase in which the cost-effectiveness of the AI techniques must be fully demonstrated. A lot of companies are carrying on researches and projects in order to evaluate suitability, maturity and costs of these techniques. An effective approach to the acquisition and use of AI techniques may be the definition of a wide project involving the development of prototypes with increasing functions and performance. The real challenge of an intensive and rapid prototyping is double: from the technical point of view one can investigate technologies and pick up information on the suitability and the adequacy of certain techniques; from the project management point of view one can redefine the purposes of the project and their timing considering the gathered experiences. In this paper we describe the methodologies and techniques employed to develop an Expert System for Pilot Assistance while performing route planning or replanning, the functional characteristics of a first prototype working on Lisp machine, and its current architecture. This prototype is able to provide the pilot with dynamic information about the geography of terrain (accessing an object-oriented database), the tactical situation, the meteo conditions and the current state of the aircraft; further, static information about threats characteristics, fuel consumption, aircraft configuration and pre-planned route are also available through an interface simulating a Head-Down Display. The system is able to plan complete ground attack missions and especially to suggest the most suitable push-up point for the run-in on target. The experiences gathered during the development of this prototype have been very useful to define the architecture of a more powerful prototype which is now being carried out.
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