The last decade has witnessed the rapid development of aeronautical engineering including all branches of applied sciences and technology dealing with aircraft and their support systems, which brings forward the higher request of safety, efficiency, and environmental protection. Modelling, control, and optimization of aeronautical engineering have played an increasingly important role to meet aeronautical requirements, and they have drawn widespread attention from communities including control theory, intelligent optimization, system science, real-time distributed computing, electronic information engineering, and aeronautical engineering industry. Driven by such motivations, the main focus of this special issue will be on the new theories, new technologies, and their applications in modeling, control, and optimization for aeronautical engineering systems. Worldwide researchers are invited to report their most recent developments and ideas in the field.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Complex avionics systems for aeronautical engineering
• Airworthiness and safety analysis for airborne systems
• Agent-based conflict resolution
• Adaptive flight control
• Autonomous cooperative control
• Intelligent optimization in aeronautical engineering
• Autonomous task planning/path planning
• Intelligent air traffic management (ATM)