System Wide Analysis Network for In-Time Safety Monitoring

The System Wide Analysis Network for Safety (SWANS) will deliver up-to-the-minute measurement of hazards and risk events in terminal areas throughout the NAS. Updated with current data every five minutes, SWANS provides timely insight into safety margin trends and detects increases in risk events. These events may indicate changes in airspace risk status and identify possible procedural and other deficiencies. SWANS offers a data processing, distribution, and display infrastructure for adding a wide array of data sources and algorithms to track hazards and measure and predict risk. SWANS contributes directly to the Thrust 5 milestone for Domain-Specific Safety Monitoring and Alerting. SWANS offers near-term benefits to diverse users by delivering in-time monitoring of risk metrics with alerts for emerging trends. SWANS monitors the NAS for medium (days before), short term (hours before), and near real time (minutes before) trends. The SWANS monitoring tool can be delivered directly to airlines and operators for timely use in safety analysis, flight planning, operations monitoring decision making, and flight crew/dispatcher training. FAA safety managers can use SWANS to identify hot spots and detect evolving safety trends. SWANS will provide real-time answers to important questions that a robust safety monitoring system should ask: What are the current status of hazard and risk events? How do those conditions compare to normal conditions? Has the number of hazards and risk events increased over the past 15 minutes? 30 minutes? Seven days? Are hazards and risk events becoming more or less frequent? Over what time periods? What are the current and recent hot spots around the NAS? By delivering timely answers to these and many other questions, SWANS meets an important FAA and industry requirement for improved tracking of risk events, and contributes to meeting the NASA technical milestone to monitor and assess terminal area safety. SWANS fills an important gap in risk monitoring in the NAS. The Traffic Collision and Avoidance System onboard aircraft and conflict probes on controller workstations provide tactical warnings that require immediate response. AutoResolver is a conflict solution algorithm developed by NASA that can support a wide range of operations. On a longer predictive timeframe, the Airspace Safety Margin Evaluation Tool, developed by Robust Analytics for NASA, predicts terminal airspace risk status four hours ahead. An important gap, however, is the lack of continuous monitoring of hazards and risk events in the airspace to identify undesirable changes in the safety state and decreasing safety margins. Such a monitoring system would provide continuous updates of changes in safety states by tracking many safety-related events and precursors. However, timely measurement of hazards are uncommon in the terminal area and SWANS fills this gap by continuous tracking of hazards and risk events, thereby providing in-time detection of evolving safety trends and possible deteriorating safety states. Build technical solutions for three major SWANS challenges: Build infrastructure that transforms streaming flight track and other data into near real time risk metrics, using an extensible architecture that can quickly process large data volumes Build real-time risk models to monitor and assess diverse hazards and risk events Secure display and distribution system for use by airlines and the FAA The work plan has four tasks. Task 1 includes deployment of the initial prototype and subsequent upgrades every six months. Upgrades built under Task 2 include infrastructure enhancements to enable more airports and new functionality and interface development. Additional hazards and risk events developed in Task 3 will be installed in the next deployed system. Task 4 develops the comprehensive risk assessment methods and models that will integrate data from all hazards and risk events and estimate risk status for each airport. The Phase II deliverables are: Deploy an initial prototype to monitor five airports, four months after contract start Demonstrate SWANS monitoring of 25 airports, nine months after contract start Demonstrate the initial full scale prototype, with added hazards and metrics, one year after contract start Demonstrate the Phase II prototype with all hazards and metrics at the end of the contract Models source code, Final Report, and User’s Guide
Benefits: SWANS contributes to meeting the System Wide Safety Project milestone to monitor and assess terminal area safety margins. Immediate benefits come from assisting NASA’s support of airline efforts to recovery safely from the pandemic. SWANS offers the In-Time Aviation Safety Management System a near-term safety monitoring and assessment system for traditional operations and an extensible infrastructure for integrating non-traditional operations as they enter the NAS. The FAA has a requirement for a system that tracks many risk events and provides timely alerts when risky events become more frequent. SWANS offers a solution to that FAA requirement. The SWANS monitoring tool can be delivered directly to airlines and operators for timely use in safety analysis, flight planning, operations monitoring decision making, and flight crew/dispatcher training.