For the purposes of this paper, the National Airspace System (NAS) encompasses the operations of all aircraft which are subject to air traffic control procedures. The NAS is a highly complex dynamic system that is sensitive to aeronautical decision-making and risk management skills. In order to ensure a healthy system with safe flights a systematic approach to anomaly detection is very important when evaluating a given set of circumstances and for determination of the best possible course of action. Given the fact that the NAS is a vast and loosely integrated network of systems, it requires improved safety assurance capabilities to maintain an extremely low accident rate under increasingly dense operating conditions. Data mining based tools and techniques are required to support and aid operators’ (such as pilots, management, or policy makers) overall decision-making capacity. Within the NAS, the ability to analyze fleetwide aircraft data autonomously is still considered a significantly challenging task. For our purposes a fleet is defined as a group of aircraft sharing generally compatible parameter lists. Here, in this effort, we aim at developing a system level analysis scheme. In this paper we address the capability for detection of fleetwide anomalies as they occur, which itself is an important initiative toward the safety of the real-world flight operations. The flight data recorders archive millions of data points with valuable information on flights everyday. The operational parameters consist of both continuous and discrete (binary & categorical) data from several critical subsystems and numerous complex procedures. In this paper, we discuss a system level anomaly detection approach based on the theory of kernel learning to detect potential safety anomalies in a very large data base of commercial aircraft. We also demonstrate that the proposed approach uncovers some operationally significant events due to environmental, mechanical, and human factors issues in high dimensional, multivariate Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) data. We present the results of our detection algorithms on real FOQA data from a regional carrier.

As new technologies are developed to handle the complexities of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), it is increasingly important to address both current and future safety concerns along with the operational, environmental, and efficiency issues within the National Airspace System (NAS). In recent years, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) safety offices have been researching ways to utilize the many safety databases maintained by the FAA, such as those involving flight recorders, radar tracks, weather, and many other high-volume sensors, in order to monitor this unique and complex system. Although a number of current technologies do monitor the frequency of known safety risks in the NAS, very few methods currently exist that are capable of analyzing large data repositories with the purpose of discovering new and previously unmonitored safety risks. While monitoring the frequency of known events in the NAS enables mitigation of already identified problems, a more proactive approach of finding unidentified issues still needs to be addressed. This is especially important in the proactive identification of new, emergent safety issues that may result from the planned introduction of advanced NextGen air traffic management technologies and procedures. Development of an automated tool that continuously evaluates the NAS to discover both events exhibiting flight characteristics indicative of safety-related concerns as well as operational anomalies will heighten the awareness of such situations in the aviation community and serve to increase the overall safety of the NAS. This paper discusses the extension of previous anomaly detection work to identify operationally significant flights within the highly complex airspace encompassing the New York area of operations, focusing on the major airports of Newark International (EWR), LaGuardia International (LGA), and John F. Kennedy International (JFK). In addition, flight traffic in the vicinity of Denver International (DEN) airport/airspace is also investigated to evaluate the impact on operations due to variances in seasonal weather and airport elevation. From our previous research, subject matter experts determined that some of the identified anomalies were significant, but could not reach conclusive findings without additional supportive data. To advance this research further, causal examination using domain experts is continued along with the integration of air traffic control (ATC) voice data to shed much needed insight into resolving which flight characteristic(s) may be impacting an aircraft's unusual profile. Once a flight characteristic is identified, it could be included in a list of potential safety precursors. This paper also describes a process that has been developed and implemented to automatically identify and produce daily reports on flights of interest from the previous day.

The worldwide civilian aviation system is one of the most complex dynamical systems created. Most modern commercial aircraft have onboard flight data recorders that record several hundred discrete and continuous parameters at approximately 1Hz for the entire duration of the flight. These data contain information about the flight control systems, actuators, engines, landing gear, avionics, and pilot commands. In this paper, recent advances in the development of a novel knowledge discovery process consisting of a suite of data mining techniques for identifying precursors to aviation safety incidents are discussed. The data mining techniques include scalable multiple-kernel learning for large-scale distributed anomaly detection. A novel multivariate time-series search algorithm is used to search for signatures of discovered anomalies on massive datasets. The process can identify operationally significant events due to environmental, mechanical, and human factors issues in the high-dimensional flight operations quality assurance data. All discovered anomalies are validated by a team of independent domain experts. This novel automated knowledge discovery process is aimed at complementing the state-of-the-art human-generated exceedance-based analysis that fails to discover previously unknown aviation safety incidents. In this paper, the discovery pipeline, the methods used, and some of the significant anomalies detected on real-world commercial aviation data are discussed.

The world-wide aviation system is one of the most complex dynamical systems ever developed and is generating data at an extremely rapid rate. Most modern commercial aircraft record several hundred flight parameters including information from the guidance, navigation, and control systems, the avionics and propulsion systems, and the pilot inputs into the aircraft. These parameters may be continuous measurements or binary or categorical measurements recorded in one second intervals for the duration of the flight. Currently, most approaches to aviation safety are reactive, meaning that they are designed to react to an aviation safety incident or accident. Here, we discuss a novel approach based on the theory of multiple kernel learning to detect potential safety anomalies in very large data bases of discrete and continuous data from world-wide operations of commercial fleets. We pose a general anomaly detection problem which includes both discrete and continuous data streams, where we assume that the discrete streams have a causal influence on the continuous streams. We also assume that atypical sequence of events in the discrete streams can lead to off-nominal system performance. We discuss the application domain, novel algorithms, and also briefly discuss results on synthetic and real-world data sets. Our algorithm uncovers operationally significant events in high dimensional data streams in the aviation industry which are not detectable using state of the art methods.

The world-wide aviation system is one of the most complex dynamical systems ever developed and is generating data at an extremely rapid rate. Most modern commercial aircraft record several hundred flight parameters including information from the guidance, navigation, and control systems, the avionics and propulsion systems, and the pilot inputs into the aircraft. These parameters may be continuous measurements or binary or categorical measurements recorded in one second intervals for the duration of the flight. Currently, most approaches to aviation safety are reactive, meaning that they are designed to react to an aviation safety incident or accident. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach based on the theory of multiple kernel learning to detect potential safety anomalies in very large data bases of discrete and continuous data from world-wide operations of commercial fleets. We pose a general anomaly detection problem which includes both discrete and continuous data streams, where we assume that the discrete streams have a causal influence on the continuous streams. We also assume that atypical sequences of events in the discrete streams can lead to off-nominal system performance. We discuss the application domain, novel algorithms, and also discuss results on real-world data sets. Our algorithm uncovers operationally significant events in high dimensional data streams in the aviation industry which are not detectable using state of the art methods.

Published at 12th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference and 14th AIAA/ISSM 17 - 19 September 2012, Indianapolis, Indiana

Modern aircraft are producing data at an unprecedented rate with hundreds of parameters being recorded on a second by second basis. The data can be used for studying the condition of the hardware systems of the aircraft and also for studying the complex interactions between the pilot and the aircraft. NASA is developing novel data mining algorithms to detect precursors to aviation safety incidents from these data sources. This talk will cover the theoretical aspects of the algorithms and practical aspects of implementing these techniques to study one of the most complex dynamical systems in the world: the national airspace.

Sample report in support of "Discovering Anomalous Aviation Safety Events Using Scalable Data Mining Algorithms" manuscript.

This paper presents a framework aimed at monitoring the behavior of aircraft in a given airspace. Trajectories that constitute typical operations are determined and learned using data-driven methods. Standard procedures are used by air traffic controllers (ATCs) to guide aircraft, ensure the safety of the airspace, and maximize runway occupancy. Even though standard procedures are used by ATCs, control of the aircraft remains with the pilots, leading to large variability in the flight patterns observed. Two methods for identifying typical operations and their variability from recorded radar tracks are presented. This knowledge base is then used to monitor the conformance of current operations against operations previously identified as typical. A tool called AirTrajectoryMiner is presented, aiming at monitoring the instantaneous health of the airspace, in real time. The airspace is “healthy” when all aircraft are flying according to typical operations. A measure of complexity is introduced, measuring the conformance of current flight to typical flight patterns. When an aircraft does not conform, the complexity increases as more attention from ATC is required to ensure safe separation between aircraft. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Dec. 2011, 12(4), pp. 1511 - 1524.

항공기의 이륙을 지원하기 위해 매 시각 발표하는 국내 공항 이륙예보를 조회하는 서비스 (기상 : 풍향, 풍속, 기온, 기압을 조회하는 서비스)