Monitoring Real-Time NAS Safety with State-Dependent Risk Models

NASA recently added real-time, system-wide safety assurance (RSSA) as one of its aeronautics strategic thrusts. As NASA, FAA, and industry introduce new technologies, concepts, and vehicles into a growing and evolving national airspace system (NAS), the need for monitoring of an increasingly complex, congested, and more automated system becomes greater. RSSA will develop risk models, methods, computational solutions, and prototype monitoring systems to move risk identification and mitigation from weeks and months to real-time. The preliminary RSSA technology roadmap identifies the need for real-time NAS-wide status monitoring but does not describe how this information would be provided or used to assess real-time changes in safety risk. Our proposal aims to demonstrate how to accomplish those objectives and quantify risk for normal safe operations and degraded states, thereby accelerating RSSA milestones. Our approach enables real-time estimates of NAS risk and can also provide valuable insight into assessments of new technologies and procedures. FAA interest in this capability offers the potential for an FAA deployment platform by integrating the state-dependent risk models with an existing FAA safety analysis and monitoring tool, the Integrated Safety Assessment Model (ISAM).

The NASA aeronautics mission directorate (ARMD) has defined a set of six thrust areas, with real-time system-wide safety assurance (RSAA) as one of the new additions in 2014. This thrust area was added in recognition of the need to demonstrate the safety of air traffic technologies developed by ARMD, during demonstration and test as well as during normal NAS operations. The FAA has tried to develop a forward-looking, prognostic safety analysis capability for many years with limited success. Our concept offers a strong start to the RSSA need to implement tools to provide for state awareness for all elements of the NAS. We go much further by integrating real-time safety monitoring with the state awareness capability. In addition, our concept, when coupled with analytical efforts currently underway, accelerates the target of providing analytical insight from weeks to days in the 2025 timeframe. Our concept applies to the following ARMD thrust objectives for RSSA: � Accelerate the detection and prognosis of systemwide safety threats � Substantially improve the ability to gain insights and develop mitigations from the growing amount of available aviation system data � Dramatically improve safety assurance within the next decade, by reducing the time to analyze, identify, and mitigate safety risks from what can now take months down to days

With its System Safety Management Transformation program, the FAA since 2010 has tried to develop models to analyze the safety impact of NextGen and move toward real-time safety assessment. One of their identified gaps has been the lack of infrastructure status and the ability to incorporate that information into their risk models. Our model responds directly to that requirement. Our approach builds on current and planned FAA availability and maintenance management systems, thereby minimizing additional investments by either NASA or FAA.

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