Information Fusion for Real-Time National Air Transportation System Prognostics under Uncertainty

Expanding Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) from an equipment-centric view to complex large-scale engineering systems is a challenging problem. One example for a large engineering system is the next generation national airspace system (NAS), which is a fully coupled cyber-physical-human system. This NASA University Leadership Initiative (ULI) project aims to address the safety needs and their technology solutions for future NAS. The ULI is a 5-year collaborative project in which researchers from several universities and commercial entities work together to advance real-time airspace safety concepts. The underlying premise is that it is imperative to be able to assess and predict the evolution of the airspace's safety state. Towards that end the work envisions to address the following issues: modeling of the airspace using both data-driven and physics-based approaches; quantifying and managing uncertainty; advancing prognostics and information fusion algorithms; and understanding and modeling human computer interface.

1. Fundamental understanding of interplay of many new data sources for NextGen with aviation safety
2. Various sources of uncertainties and their coupling effects will be systematically investigated for accurate failure and risk assessment of the extremely large-scale, complex NAS
3. Development of a commercial high-fidelity gate-to-gate simulation tool for air traffic simulation which will be used by various governmental agencies and operator
4. A community-based collaborative simulation framework will be developed and deployed for continued sustainable technology evolution for the NAS safety research community
5. Systematic training of next generation aviation engineers to create a pipeline for future labor sources for air traffic management

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 3) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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