SMS education in accredited undergraduate collegiate aviation programs

Safety is a critical part of aviation. Current practices demonstrate that agencies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are encouraging Safety Management Systems (SMS) for many aviation components, to include airports, air carriers, and air traffic control (Kirsch, 2011). The FAA claims that SMS would also be valuable to collegiate aviation (Adjekum, 2014). With safety management growing in aviation, the purpose of this research was to determine whether or not SMS is being taught in programs accredited by the Aviation Accreditation Board International (AABI) at the undergraduate collegiate aviation level. The total population of 30 institutions offering more than 70 AABI-accredited collegiate aviation programs (e.g., flight, aviation management, and air traffic control) was evaluated. The review consisted of aviation safety course descriptions found in university catalogs. It was discovered that SMS is not generally included in undergraduate aviation-accredited programs. While many courses cover SMS-related concepts, only 13% of the evaluated programs have an SMS course or SMS as a topic in an aviation safety course description

Risk Assessment under Uncertainty

System safety assessment (SSA) has become a standard practice in air traffic management (ATM). System safety assessment aims, through a systematic and formal process, to detect, quantify, and diminish the derived risks and to guarantee that critical safety systems achieve the level of safety approved by the regulatory authorities. Verification of compliance with the established safety levels becomes the last but an essential part of the safety assurance process. This chapter provides a Bayesian inference methodology to assess and evaluate the compliance with the established safety levels under the presence of uncertainty in the assessment of systems performances

INTEGRATED COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPORTATION EFFICIENCY – SOME STUDY CASES

A critical factor in search, rescue or criminal investigation is time – specifically, the time needed to complete a big number of tasks that occur in any emergency. A critical asset in assisting disaster relief teams and public safety personnel in their mission to save lives and defend property loss is the access to resources data – location of personnel, emergency service resources, streets, buildings. The ability to locate resources, on foot or in vehicles, in relation to the local transportation infrastructure in a specific geographic area need to be considered in a new way of managing emergency situations. The TETRA based systems integrated with a wide range of mapping, tracking, alarming and resource-allocations applications used in conjunction with a dispatcher tool allows operational teams to manage a large ground, water and air-based emergency teams using voice and text communications.Public Safety, Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre (MRCC), AIS, RIS, Air Traffic Management (ATM), Incident and Operative Scenarios, Operability, Efficiency

Modelling of stochastic hybrid systems with applications to accident risk assessment

Stochastic dynamical modelling of accident risk is of high interest for the safe design of complex safety-critical systems and operations, such as in nuclear and chemical industries, and advanced air traffic management. In comparison with statistical analysis of collected data, stochastic dynamical modelling approach has the advantage of enabling the use of stochastic analysis and advanced Monte Carlo simulation approaches

Aviation Safety Regulations versus CNS/ATM Systems and Functionalities

The safety, security, efficiency, regularity, and sustainable development of international civil aviation operations revolve around a web of well-defined legal, policy, regulatory and methodological frameworks, which prescribe, inter alia, mandatory, advisory, prescriptive or discretionary requirements in respect of interactivities within the civil aviation community. In relation to this body of legal, policy, regulatory and methodological frameworks, the Convention on International Civil Aviation (otherwise known as the Chicago Convention, 1944) clearly represents the locus classicus. The Chicago Convention, which governs the activities of Contracting States of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), incorporates 96 Articles and embodies, to date, 19 Annexes and five PANS (Procedures for Air Navigation). Of the 19 Annexes to the Chicago Convention, sixteen deal with safety and contingent subject-matters such as the efficiency and security of international air navigation. This paper undertakes an exploration of the conceptual dimensions of aviation safety within the broader context of safety. It also examines the growing safety ramifications of CNS/ATM (communication, navigation, surveillance/air traffic management) systems and functionalities; identifies the critical elements of the aviation safety web; and discusses emerging issues and challenges in air navigation safety. Emphasis is placed on the need for globally-inclusive considerations in respect of a harmonized approach to the regulation of all the safety-critical elements of air navigation service, particularly in relation to system and personnel certification considerations in the CNS/ATM realm in view of the changing roles of air traffic safety electronics personnel (ATSEP) – the ICAO recognized nomenclature for personnel involved and proven competent in the installation, operation, and/or maintenance of a CNS/ATM system

System elements required to guarantee the reliability, availability and integrity of decision-making information in a complex airborne autonomous system

Current air traffic management systems are centred on piloted aircraft, in which all the main decisions are made by humans. In the world of autonomous vehicles, there will be a driving need for decisions to be made by the system rather than by humans due to the benefits of more automation such as reducing the likelihood of human error, handling more air traffic in national airspace safely, providing prior warnings of potential conflicts etc. The system will have to decide on courses of action that will have highly safety critical consequences. One way to ensure these decisions are robust is to guarantee that the information being used for the decision is valid and of very high integrity. [Continues.

Big data analytics for time critical maritime and aerial mobility forecasting

The correlated exploitation of heterogeneous data sources offering very large archival and streaming data is important to increase the accuracy of computations when analysing and predicting future states of moving entities. Aiming to significantly advance the capacities of systems to improve safety and effectiveness of critical operations involving a large number of moving entities in large geographical areas, this paper describes progress achieved towards time critical big data analytics solutions to user-defined challenges in the air-traffic management and maritime domains. Besides, this paper presents further research challenges concerning data integration and management, predictive analytics for trajectory and events forecasting, and visual analytics

Challenges Caused by the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in the Air Traffic Management

The increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicle poses new challenges in the aviation industry especially the air traffic control, which is responsible for the safe flight operations in the controlled airspaces. In order to protect the conventional aircraft a new operation environment has to be created, which guarantee the safe flying and the possibility of the fulfilment of the flight. In the article drone related safety and operational problems are highlighted. All issue connected to the coexistence of manned and unmanned aircrafts are critical, thus their management have significant importance. Spread and wide use of unmanned aerial vehicle traffic management systems (UTM) can manage the critical operational issues, but is has to be defined that what is the problem, what is the scope, what is the operational environment. Services and functions related to the operation of the UTM system are defined, which are necessary for the safe flying fulfilled by the unmanned vehicles

Safety arguments for next generation location aware computing

Concerns over the accuracy, availability, integrity and continuity of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have limited the integration of GPS and GLONASS for safety-critical applications. More recent augmentation systems, such as the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) and the North American Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) have begun to address these concerns. Augmentation architectures build on the existing GPS/GLONASS infrastructures to support locationbased services in Safety of Life (SoL) applications. Much of the technical development has been directed by air traffic management requirements, in anticipation of the more extensive support to be offered by GPS III and Galileo. WAAS has already been approved to provide vertical guidance against ICAO safety performance criteria for aviation applications. During the next twelve months, we will see the full certification of EGNOS for SoL applications. This paper identifies strong similarities between the safety assessment techniques used in Europe and North America. Both have relied on hazard analysis techniques to derive estimates of the Probability of Hazardously Misleading Information (PHMI). Later sections identify significant differences between the approaches adopted in application development. Integrated fault trees have been developed by regulatory and commercial organisations to consider both infrastructure hazards and their impact on non-precision RNAV/VNAV approaches using WAAS. In contrast, EUROCONTROL and the European Space Agency have developed a more modular approach to safety-case development for EGNOS. It remains to be seen whether the European or North American strategy offers the greatest support as satellite based augmentation systems are used within a growing range of SoL applications from railway signalling through to Unmanned Airborne Systems. The key contribution of this paper is to focus attention on the safety arguments that might support this wider class of location based services

Proceedings of the Sixth NASA Langley Formal Methods (LFM) Workshop

Today's verification techniques are hard-pressed to scale with the ever-increasing complexity of safety critical systems. Within the field of aeronautics alone, we find the need for verification of algorithms for separation assurance, air traffic control, auto-pilot, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), adaptive avionics, automated decision authority, and much more. Recent advances in formal methods have made verifying more of these problems realistic. Thus we need to continually re-assess what we can solve now and identify the next barriers to overcome. Only through an exchange of ideas between theoreticians and practitioners from academia to industry can we extend formal methods for the verification of ever more challenging problem domains. This volume contains the extended abstracts of the talks presented at LFM 2008: The Sixth NASA Langley Formal Methods Workshop held on April 30 - May 2, 2008 in Newport News, Virginia, USA. The topics of interest that were listed in the call for abstracts were: advances in formal verification techniques; formal models of distributed computing; planning and scheduling; automated air traffic management; fault tolerance; hybrid systems/hybrid automata; embedded systems; safety critical applications; safety cases; accident/safety analysis