NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA System-Wide Safety Project In-time Safety Management Capabilities for Emerging Operations By Dr. Pankaj Dhussa

1. NASA’s System-Wide Safety Project
In-time Safety Management Capabilities for Emerging Operations
Challenge
• Advanced air mobility operational concepts are
emerging rapidly with a variety of proposed civil and
commercial applications and greatly anticipated
benefits.
• Safety will play a key role in either constraining or
enabling these benefits, yet an acceptable level of
safety and timely mechanisms for risk mitigation
during operations remain to be determined.
In-time Safety Management Concept and
Information Flow
Research to determine requirements by demon-
strating SFCs across emerging mission domains
Expected Impacts
NASA research seeks to explore, discover, and
recommend minimum requirements, considerations,
and guidelines for future capabilities necessary to
monitor, assess and mitigate safety risks during these
new types of operations; for example, those envisioned
for future highly-autonomous unmanned aircraft and
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles.
Partners and/or Participants
• Industry, Academia, other Government Agencies, and other NASA Projects
Proposed Solution
NASA is developing advanced services, functions, and capabilities (SFCs) to
enable in-time aviation safety management systems (IASMS) that:
ü Monitor: Demonstrate continuous access to high integrity data produced by
services and functions that can support flight-critical automated and
supervisory assessment and contingency management functions.
ü Assess: Demonstrate on-line diagnostic and predictive capabilities that
provide lead time for decision-making by deterministic automated functions,
or via supervisory oversight and intervention.
ü Mitigate: Demonstrate strategies for safely assigning and managing control
and authority across autonomous functions and human participants for
timely (in-time) hazard mitigation (e.g., executing contingencies).
Results
• NASA is collecting and analyzing data from a series of simulation and flight
tests, developing and improving prognostic capabilities associated with high-
priority hazards, and exploring the usability of operator display concepts that
enable more effective safety management during these new and complex
operations.
• Multiple NASA partners have conducted complementary research to broaden
the span and advancement of support tools and capabilities; all of which may
be applied pre-flight or in-flight to increase hazard detection, risk mitigation
and situational awareness, or post-flight/off-line to identify trends,
anomalies, and precursors when looking across sets of similar flights.
• Data and findings from these investigations, application to future use-cases,
and lessons learned will be reported.
Hazard monitoring/assessment: modeling,
diagnostics, prognostics, forecasting, alerting
Achieving anticipated benefits necessitate ensuring
the safety of autonomous systems in complex
operational environments
Next Steps
• NASA continues to evaluate, expand, and mature the in-time safety
management concept and enabling capabilities such as tools/services for
hazard and risk prediction—particularly, risks that may be encountered by
the vehicle (e.g., power loss), the environment (e.g., unsafe proximity to people
on the ground, adverse weather, urban structures) and the airspace (e.g., air
traffic, airspace boundary excursions).
• These investigations contribute to proactively assuring the safety of future
UAS and UAM operations in urban environments.