system-wide safet y assur ance
O The Airspace Operations Lab at NASA Ames conducts simulation of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). NASA Ames Research Center’s advanced airspace modeling and simulation tools have been used extensively to model the flow of air traffic across the United States and to evaluate new concepts in airspace design, traffic flow management, and optimization.
(SMART-NAS) for Safe Trajectory-Based Operations. Dr. Shon Grabbe, who manages the SMART-NAS project, said it’s designed to evaluate NextGen technologies and concepts that remain to be implemented: “We’ll have some work on trajectory-based operations, focusing on aircraft conflict detection and resolution,”
he said. The project’s initial TBO focus will be on procedures and methods that might be used to improve efficiencies in the New York City airspace. The other concepts to be evaluated include a system that determines how and where aircraft separation functions should be performed, and “networked ATM,” or the control functions that can benefit from networked and cloud-based architectures that allow real-time data sharing. The evaluation of these concepts, Grabbe explained, requires discrete tools – including the real-time safety modeling and systems assurance technologies being developed by NASA researchers. The inherent challenge will be to develop an algorithm that’s responsive to the dynamic conditions of flight. “A lot of those previous studies really focused on kind of a post-operational assessment,” he said. “So maybe a month after a potentially unsafe event occurred, you could collect all the radar tracking data, or data from the flight deck of the aircraft itself, and then you could run that data through these advanced data-mining tools and capabilities, and they would identify these potentially unsafe situations – aircraft coming too close to one another, or maybe an aircraft not following a published procedure. There are many things that could make for an unsafe situation. But those analyses are typically post-operational. They happen after an event has already occurred.” One of the primary obstacles to evaluating a tool that aims to resolve a problem before it happens, of course, is access to real-time data that would enable it to function as designed. A key enabler of the SMARTNAS project is the SMART-NAS Test Bed development – with an open-architecture, networked system that will function in “shadow mode” as a simulator of the entire NAS, with live real-world data feeds from airlines, airports, FAA facilities, and other elements of
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