Call for Papers for Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics Written 17 April 2015

Special Issue on “Computational Guidance and Control”

A clear trend in the field of aerospace guidance and control has emerged in recent years in what we call “Computational Guidance and Control” (CG&C). In contrast to traditional guidance and control, CG&C has the following identifying trademarks:

• Guidance and control laws and controllers of fixed structures are replaced by algorithms.


• The generation of guidance and control commands relies extensively on onboard computation. The extensive onboard computation requirement is in fact the defining difference between CG&C and other branches of computational engineering and sciences.


• The process of determining guidance and control commands may be model-based or data-based, and does not require significant pre-mission planning, gain tuning, or extensive offline design of nominal references.

Guidance and control technologies with these traits are critical for system autonomy and support of autonomous operations. One can point to fully numerical, iteration-based advanced (powered and unpowered) guidance algorithms for space transportation systems and hugely successful model predictive control methods as well known examples. CG&C allows more than ever before complex guidance and control tasks incorporating many state and control constraints to be performed, offering a great potential of significant increased capability with a simultaneous reduction in operational costs associated with guidance and control systems.  However, CG&C is far from simply taking a guidance or control problem and solving it numerically onboard via brute force. Rather, the unique challenges of onboard applications place a premium on computational efficiency, reliability, accuracy, and robustness of the solution process. In many cases optimized solutions are also desired or even necessary. Consequently, the success of CG&C likely demands more up-front investment in formulating, modeling, and analyzing the problem. It often also necessitates the control designer to consider hardware constraints up front, during the controller design process. Novel exploitation of analysis results and features of a problem and innovative tailoring design of the algorithm are often times among the salient characteristics. Accordingly, the practitioner will frequently employ methods and take advantage of advances in system and control theory, computational mathematics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, embedded computing, and other disciplines of sciences and engineering.

This special issue on CG&C intends to bring recognition to this significant trend in aerospace guidance and control and afford it a proper descriptive term. Even with the great strides made in recent years in CG&C, much remains a work in progress. This special issue of the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics (JGCD) will provide a focused forum to disseminate the latest research work in CG&C, and further stimulate interest in this area of great potential. Original research papers that meet the afore-listed CG&C descriptions (with special consideration given to onboard applications) are sought in, but not exclusive to, the following topics:

• Control (model predictive control, computational optimal control, control allocation, etc.)


• Guidance (all flight phases, powered or unpowered, space or atmospheric flight)


• Autonomous mission and trajectory planning and optimization


• Modeling of system dynamics and problem formulations promoting computational benefits


• Air traffic management applications (with focus on onboard applications)


• Embedded computation implementations for real-time  guidance and control


• CG&C verification and validation

Please submit papers by 31 October, 2015, at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aiaa-jgcd. Authors are reminded to make sure to select Special Issue “Computational Guidance and Control” during submission. Both Full-Length Papers and Engineering Notes are welcome. Engineering Notes are intended for disclosures of significant data or development of limited scope. A Note does not have Abstract, and should not exceed 20 double-spaced pages in 12-point fonts. The Editors will decide whether a submitted manuscript is in scope for this special issue. If a manuscript is deemed not in scope for the special issue, the author will be notified and the manuscript will be considered by the JGCD as a regular submission.

For questions, please contact Prof. Ping Lu, Editor-in-Chief of JGCD (plu@iastate.edu), and Guest Editors Prof. Panagiotis Tsiotras (tsiotras@gatech.edu), and Prof. Mehran Mesbahi (mesbahi@uw.edu). If you already have a manuscript under review by the JGCD and would like to have it considered for the special issue, please contact Prof. Ping Lu with a copy of the request sent to the Guest Editors.