A leading manufacturer of commercial and military Flight Management Systems (FMS) needed FMS engineering expertise to assist in the development of advanced predictive performance features to be incorporated into their commercial FMS software. Optimization Technologies offers engineering expertise for FMS software development and was well suited to assist this customer in delivering their FMS software upgrade to their customers in minimal time and with maximum ROI on their investment. After some initial consultation with the customer, we mutually determined that the customer had the software programming capabilities in house to write the software but they needed consulting services from Op Tech to develop the software requirements for these advanced features in a level of detail that the developers could write the FMS code.

Today's advanced FMS is capable of performing optimization of an entered flight plan to minimize trip cost. These cost optimization functions usually reside within the Airplane Performance area of the FMS software, otherwise referred to as FMS Perf. This customer recognized that incorporating advanced FMS Perf functionality into their commercial FMS would give then a competitive advantage because these technologies have a proved cost savings to the aircraft operators. The flight path optimization that is possible with the FMS can provide the aircraft pilot with a four-dimensional flight plan which minimizes the overall trip costs.


FMS Perf, along with FMS Lateral and Vertical Guidance, is considered one of the most complex functional skills for software development. Optimization Technologies' engineering team possesses decades of FMS Perf, Guidance, Navigation and other functional experience, and also has engineers with specific flight path optimization experience. Op Tech and our customer coloborated on the development of a statement of work to define the specific tasks for this project. Op Tech engineering was tasked with:

• Creating white papers for initial concept development of new/enhanced predictive FMS Perf features.
• Holding white paper reviews with customer engineers to educate them on the features and discuss specific requirements.
• Develop detailed software requirements to permit implementation of predictive performance features in accordance with DO-178B guidelines.
• Holding peer reviews of software requirements for new/enhanced FMS Perf features with customer engineers.
• support for requirements developed by Optimization Technologies, such as answering questions from customer Engineers, clarifying requirements, etc.

By contracting with Optimization Technologies, this customer was able to maximize their ROI by:

• Supplementing their engineering resources with highly experienced engineers which required minimal time to come up to speed on the functional expertise required.
• Taking advantage of web-based software program management tools used by Optimization Technologies to complete this program with Op Tech engineers 100% off-site.

This project was completed on-time and on budget and illustrated the value that Optimization Technologies provides with our attention to customer needs, flexibility in our business processes and skills of our engineering team. In this case, the customer did not require full software life cycle development. We worked with the customer to determine that they only needed our engineering expertise to develop white papers and detailed software requirements, and once these were available, the customer's engineering team could write the software.