Information Fusion for Real-Time National Air Transportation System Prognostics under Uncertainty

Project Introduction

Expanding Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) from an equipment-centric view to complex large-scale engineering systems is a challenging problem. One example for a large engineering system is the next generation national airspace system (NAS), which is a fully coupled cyber-physical-human system. This NASA University Leadership Initiative (ULI) project aims to address the safety needs and their technology solutions for future NAS. The ULI is a 5-year collaborative project in which researchers from several universities and commercial entities work together to advance real-time airspace safety concepts. The underlying premise is that it is imperative to be able to assess and predict the evolution of the airspace's safety state. Towards that end the work envisions to address the following issues: modeling of the airspace using both data-driven and physics-based approaches; quantifying and managing uncertainty; advancing prognostics and information fusion algorithms; and understanding and modeling human computer interface.

Anticipated Benefits

  • Fundamental understanding of interplay of many new data sources for NextGen with aviation safety
  • Various sources of uncertainties and their coupling effects will be systematically investigated for accurate failure and risk assessment of the extremely large-scale, complex NAS
  • Development of a commercial high-fidelity gate-to-gate simulation tool for air traffic simulation which will be used by various governmental agencies and operator
  • A community-based collaborative simulation framework will be developed and deployed for continued sustainable technology evolution for the NAS safety research community
  • Systematic training of next generation aviation engineers to create a pipeline for future labor sources for air traffic management

Primary U.S. Work Locations and Key Partners

Organizations Performing Work Role Type Location
Arizona State University (ASU) Lead Organization Academic Tempe, AZ
Carnegie Mellon University Supporting Organization Academic Pittsburgh, PA
Optimal Synthesis, Inc. Supporting Organization Industry Los Altos, CA
Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) Supporting Organization Academic Boulder, CO
Vanderbilt University Supporting Organization Academic Nashville, TN

Organizational Responsibility

Responsible Mission Directorate

Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD)

Lead Organization

Arizona State University

Responsible Program

Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program

Project Management

Principal Investigator

Yongming Liu

Co-Investigators

Sankaran Mahadevan

Barron Bichon

Aditi Chattopadhyay

Nancy J Cooke

P. K. Menon

Pingbo Tang

Hao Yan

Mary C. Miemczyk

Lei Ying

Project Duration

Jun 2017 - Jun 2022

Technology Maturity (TRL)

Start: 2

Current: 3

Estimated End: 5

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Applied Research
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Development
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Demo & Test