The high numbers of people travelling by air, coupled with an expanded range of non-conventional aircraft, including various unmanned vehicles, makes the skies ever-more challenging to manage. The European Union’s SESAR programme was set up to increase the efficiency and environmentally-friendliness of European airspace by developing and harnessing cutting edge technologies – especially those that automate operations. To quantify their likely impact SESAR applies cost-benefit analysis to key performance areas like safety, capacity and operational efficiency. To support this performance-driven approach, the FARO project, which stands for "saFety And Resilience guidelines for aviatiOn”, has developed a set of methodologies and techniques to assess air traffic management (ATM) safety and resilience.
These changes can be diverse. For example, the application of a new technology, changes in the organisations, or changes in how people operate the ATM system and the operational environment. The project was organised through four objectives, which are described as follows:
- O1 Capitalisation on the existent knowledge of safety. This objective pursued to systematically extract existent safety knowledge by applying data-driven techniques combined with a knowledge-based approach, levering the knowledge of experts within the consortium, and exploiting experience from other transport modes.
- O2 Quantification of the impact of increasing the level of automation on ATM safety levels. This objective aimed at generating predictive models of safety events as a function of the technological, organisational, human, and procedural dimensions and automation solutions defined in the scenarios considered.
- O3 Analysis of the impact of higher levels of automation on ATM resilient performance. This objective was related to the analysis of the impact on resilient performance (absorptive, restorative and adaptive capacity) of the system by characterising it as a function of performance variability, brittleness and adaptive capacity in terms of the same dimensions and automation solutions of objective O2.
- O4 Provision of design guidelines and identification of future research needs.
In summary, the main objective of this project was to contribute to the extant knowledge of safety and resilience of the ATM system by providing design guidelines for applying FARO’s approach and identifying areas of improvement and future research needs as well. As main conclusions of the project and related to the project:
1. Safety Performance Functions and the technical approach selected by the project have demonstrated provision of a non-linear safety quantification methodology, flexible, and capable of accommodating different types of precursors of safety-related occurrences, answering to O1 & O2.
2. FARO demonstrated that Resilience Engineering can adopt quantitative methods complementing the current qualitative approach. FARO showed evidence about how quantitative aspects of performance can be documented, being able to represent an understanding of the systems under study that went beyond a qualitative narrative of the strategies of the system agents and actors.
3. The integration between Safety and Resilience Engineering through the methods proposed by FARO has the potential to facilitate the understanding and evaluation of interdependencies between competing goals. These methods facilitate the understanding on how a change in the operating system (human, technology, organisations) can impact in the balance between safety and resilient performance.
