Contingency Planning Toolkit for Advanced Air Mobility

NASAs Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) concepts envision increasing autonomy, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to maintain operational efficiency while ensuring safety. Increasing autonomy while maintaining or improving efficiency and safety will require effective teaming between humans and automation in routine and contingency operations. The UAM and AAM concepts describe procedures for addressing contingencies, implicitly assuming automation will be able to coordinate well enough to address contingencies, with little or no human input, if procedures are pre-defined. However, if traditional air traffic operations are to be a guide, humans will need to be involved in coordinated contingency planning for UAM/AAM operations. To address the need for coordinated contingency planning in UAM/AAM, we propose Contingency Planning Toolkit for Advanced Air Mobility (CPT AAMO), a collection of procedures and software for contingency planning and management and processes and capabilities to evaluate proposed procedures to support research, development, and certification. Its design is based on a systematic analysis of potential allocations of contingency planning functions. Metrics include function allocation coherency, operational tempo, and coordination load, enabling us to assess each candidate architecture according to properties like safety, resilience, equity, integration, and resistance to cyber-attack. This effort fills a gap in AAM concept development, providing appropriate architectures and function allocations for contingency planning in a highly automated system. In Phase I, Mosaic ATM proved the feasibility of our approach and derived functional and information requirements for various entities within the UAM ecosystem. In Phase II, we propose to harden and expand the offerings in the CPT AAMO Toolkit, maturing from concept exploration to early technical implementation, preparing the innovation for commercialization. NASA’s Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) concepts will require effective teaming between humans and automation in routine and contingency operations. The UAM/AAM concepts describe contingency procedures that assume automation will address contingencies, with little or no human input, if procedures are pre-defined. However, humans will have roles in coordinated contingency planning for UAM/AAM operations. To address the need for coordinated contingency planning in AAM, we propose Contingency Planning Toolkit for Advanced Air Mobility (CPT AAMO), a set of procedures and software for contingency planning and management and processes and capabilities to evaluate proposed procedures to support research, development, and certification. Its design is based on a systematic analysis of potential allocations of contingency planning functions. This effort fills a gap in AAM concept development, providing appropriate architectures and function allocations for contingency planning in a highly automated system. Objectives Apply computational work domain modeling to systematically evaluate contingency procedures to uncover interdependencies and quantify tradeoffs Map work modeling results to human-automation interaction design patterns to drive automation design Encapsulate automation requirements in software deployed to the UAM network Develop a rubric for evaluating UAM/AAM contingency plans to support certification requirements and evidence gathering Proposed Deliverables Candidate procedures for contingency planning and management, alternate function allocations, measures for comparing alternatives, and their relative merits Simulation results quantifying differences in candidate procedures and function allocations Functional, information, and performance requirements for contingency planning and management in UAM/AAM environment. Proposed data to collect to validate the functional and information requirements and quantify the performance requirements. Software services to support contingency planning and management Demonstration of software services in a representative UAM/AAM network Documented rubric for evaluating proposed procedures for managing a representative contingency
Benefits: Support validation of contingency planning roles, responsibilities, and procedures for AAM concepts in tabletop, simulation, and field evaluations. Integration with or transfer of software to NASA’s Freddie capability to support future NASA demonstrations and evaluations. Participation in future AAM National Campaign demonstrations and evaluations to explore contingency planning and management in a distributed environment. Toolkit for performing contingency planning functions in a distributed work system. Toolkit for UAM and AAM fleet operators, Providers of Services to UAM (PSUs), and others to participate in coordinated contingency planning and management. Contingency planning and management software offered through software sales, licenses, and/or subscriptions. Evidence gathering for prospective UAM/AAM participants to gain FAA authorization to offer their services in the airspace.