Estimated time of arrival - an estimate of the time it will take to reach a final destination by a specific object, such as a train , ship , aircraft , car . Also, the term is very often used. in other cases where it is necessary to give an estimate of the time until the completion of a certain work, for example, ETA also means the expected time to complete the download of the file , and in this case it can be interpreted as “estimated time of accomplishment”.
The calculation of arrival time can be carried out in various ways. For example, calculating the moment of arrival of an aircraft is usually based on the actual moment of takeoff and the known average duration of the flight, but to calculate the moment of arrival of the vessel, its current location and speed are already taken into account, since in this case the duration of the flight can vary greatly. In the case of estimating the time for road vehicles, all this information may already be insufficient, since its speed may decrease significantly in the presence of traffic congestion or other unforeseen circumstances.
Also, such an assessment can be used in computer systems to predict the execution time of a particular task, for example, estimating the remaining calculation time. File download time is calculated automatically based on the average data transfer speed and file size. Compliance with this assessment depends on the stability of the data channel.