Human-system safety methods for development of advanced air traffic management systems

The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) is supporting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the development of advanced air traffic management (ATM) systems as part of the Advanced Air Transportation Technologies program. As part of this program INEEL conducted a survey of human-system safety methods that have been applied to complex technical systems, to identify lessons learned from these applications and provide recommendations for the development of advanced ATM systems. The domains that were surveyed included offshore oil and gas, commercial nuclear power, commercial aviation, and military. The survey showed that widely different approaches are used in these industries, and that the methods used range from very high-level, qualitative approaches to very detailed quantitative methods such as human reliability analysis (HRA) and probabilistic safety assessment (PSA). In addition, the industries varied widely in how effectively they incorporate human-system safety assessment in the design, development, and testing of complex technical systems. In spite of the lack of uniformity in the approaches and methods used, it was found that methods are available that can be combined and adapted to support the development of advanced air traffic management systems (author) (ml)