This is a report on a continuing study of automated analyses of experiential textual reports to gain insight into the causal factors of human errors in aviation operations. The intent of this research is to better understand the quantitative and qualitative attributes of an aviation incident, and to identify the respective contributions of their interaction to incident occurrence.

Aviation safety systems have undergone dramatic changes over the past fifty years. If you take a look at the early technology in this area, you'll see that there was a lot of work done in the area of so-called 'built-in-testing' (BIT) which essentially tests connectivity between different components. Technology has moved forward very far since that time. With the massive storage systems and advanced sensors and other communications systems, we are now able to capture and store vast quantities of health and control related data. This data is usually stored off-line for future analysis. In many cases, we also have an abundance of human-written text reports that relate to known safety issues. A key problem is to 'look' across all these data sources in order to find precursors to safety events. Although humans do look at many aspects of the data, it is difficult, if not impossible for them to integrate all the information available in a meaningful way. Other industries face this glut of data in their own way. Businesses have invested heavily in business intelligence products based on data mining that are designed to convert data into actionable information to maximize their profits or other metrics. The IVHM project is investing in data mining technologies to help sift through these massive data sets to uncover actionable information from a safety perspective. I've attached a presentation that Irv Statler and I gave at NASA HQ on this subject during an Aeronautics Technical Seminar. A video of the talk is also included. It's about 90 minutes long, so grab some popcorn. :)

Increasing demand for improved reliability and survivability of mission-critical systems is driving the development of health monitoring and Automated Contingency Management (ACM) systems. An ACM system is expected to adapt autonomously to fault conditions with the goal of still achieving mission objectives by allowing some degradation in system performance within permissible limits. ACM performance depends on supporting technologies like sensors and anomaly detection, diagnostic/prognostic and reasoning algorithms. This paper presents the development of a generic prototype test bench software framework for developing and validating ACM systems for advanced propulsion systems called the Propulsion ACM (PACM) Test Bench. The architecture has been implemented for a Monopropellant Propulsion System (MPS) to demonstrate the validity of the approach. A Simulink model of the MPS has been developed along with a fault injection module. It has been shown that the ACM system is capable of mitigating the failures by searching for an optimal strategy. Furthermore, few relevant experiments have been presented to show proof of concepts.

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.

Electrical power systems play a critical role in spacecraft and aircraft, and they exhibit a rich variety of failure modes. This paper discusses electrical power system fault diagnosis by means of probabilistic techniques. Specically, we discuss our development of a diagnostic capability for an electrical power system testbed, ADAPT, located at NASA Ames. We emphasize how we have tackled two challenges, regarding modelling and real-time performance, often encountered when developing diagnostic applications. We carefully discuss our Bayesian network modeling approach for electrical power systems. To achieve real-time performance, we build on recent theoretically well-founded developments that compile a Bayesian network into an arithmetic circuit. Arithmetic circuits have low footprint and are optimized for embedded, real-time systems such as spacecraft and aircraft. We discuss our probabilistic diagnostic models developed for ADAPT along with successful experimental results.

The loading of spacecraft propellants is a complex, risky operation. Therefore, diagnostic solutions are neces- sary to quickly identify when a fault occurs, so that recov- ery actions can be taken or an abort procedure can be initi- ated. Model-based diagnosis solutions, established using an in-depth analysis and understanding of the underlying physi- cal processes, offer the advanced capability to quickly detect and isolate faults, identify their severity, and predict their ef- fects on system performance. We develop a physics-based model of a cryogenic propellant loading system, which de- scribes the complex dynamics of liquid hydrogen filling from a storage tank to an external vehicle tank, as well as the in- fluence of different faults on this process. The model takes into account the main physical processes such as highly non- equilibrium condensation and evaporation of the hydrogen vapor, pressurization, and also the dynamics of liquid hydro- gen and vapor flows inside the system in the presence of he- lium gas. Since the model incorporates multiple faults in the system, it provides a suitable framework for model-based di- agnostics and prognostics algorithms. Using this model, we analyze the effects of faults on the system, derive symbolic fault signatures for the purposes of fault isolation, and per- form fault identification using a particle filter approach. We demonstrate the detection, isolation, and identification of a number of faults using simulation-based experiments.

항공사고 관련 용어들을 정리 하고 상세한 설명을 통하여 항공사고 관련 용어를 빨리 찾을수 있도록 정보 제공 (순번, 용어,설명)

A sampling of reports involving TFR and ADIZ incidents.

첨단소재, 동력장치, 전기전자 시스템등을 갖춘 초대형 항공기의 출연에 따른 새로운 시스템, 장비 및 절차 등을 학습할수 있도록 최신 동향을 반영하는데 중점을 둠