Increased automation promises scalable, more resilient air traffic services in line with the strategic objectives of the Digital European Sky. Ensuring new technology improves performance while maintaining safety calls for design guidelines to manage its impact on organisational, human and procedural actions.

FARO addressed this objective by developing a conceptual framework for safety and resilience, underpinned by the exploitation of natural language processing techniques to expand it based on reports of past incidents. The project then advanced in three different streams: The development of safety performance functions; resilience engineering and quantitative methods based on data exploitation; and the integration between these views. 

The research used Bayesian belief networks to provide a non-linear methodology for quantifying safety levels and undertook activities to develop safety performance functions that were sufficiently flexible to accommodate different features. It demonstrated that resilience engineering can adopt quantitative methods to complement existing qualitative ones. In addition, by integrating safety and resilience engineering methods, the project demonstrated it could facilitate a deeper understanding of the interdependencies between competing goals in the air traffic management system. 

FARO validated its approach in three real-world use cases in Spain. The two operational changes included the deployment of direct route airspace around Santiago, and the re-organisation of the airspace above Barcelona feeding the Balearic Islands. The third use case concerned automation, with approach controllers at Barcelona airport receiving information directly downlinked from aircraft. FARO compared the situation before and after the changes in each use case by analysing data going back to 2013.

The key outcomes of the project are presented in a single document Safety and Resilience Guidelines. FARO’s techniques could prove a milestone in helping stakeholders quantify safety levels and identify resilience strategies, key to keeping European citizens flying confidently.

Benefits

• Safety performance functions
• Resilient performance indicators
• Identifies hidden safety precursors