Safety and Resilience

As safety is the result of the complex interaction between processes, technology and people working together, the introduction of automation can have more implications on safety than just technical reliability. Proposals can research how increasing the level of automation in ATM could affect the delivered safety levels and develop guidelines for organizations and their respective interactions as well as research and development activities on future automation. These research activities should take into account the state of art on the research on High Performance and High Reliability Organisations and related disciplines.

Proposals may also aim at identifying future research needs related to safety by analysing performance or safety recordings, in which case proposals must demonstrate that they have access to this data. In particular, research activities may aim to identify safety challenges through a large scale analysis of accident and incident data. These activities should evaluate how well identified safety challenges are expected to be addressed by existing SESAR solutions or candidate solutions and, if necessary, may propose at the end of the project new potential SESAR solutions to address the identified and not yet covered safety challenges.

Proposals may also address the increasing need to consider resilience during system design and take into account the three complementary resilience capacities: absorptive capacity, restorative capacity and adaptive capacity. Projects working in this area should analyse the resilience of today’s ATM system and assess how envisioned changes might impact its resilience in the future. In today’s system, humans are a key element for system resilience through team-work, coordination and learning. The expected increase of automation is likely to impact the role that humans are able to play in supporting resilience, thereby requiring an evolution. As there is a huge potential to learn from other sectors (e.g. public safety, banking), projects are encouraged to investigate how resilience, in particular disruption management, is addressed in these domains and to identify approaches and asses their potential for transferring them to ATM to address current or future needs. Projects may consider multiple possibilities and compare and benchmark them against each other and todays ATM systems and procedures. Modelling and simulation might be used for assessing the resilience of selected approaches.

Safety is inherent to ATM, so safety of operations has always been the highest priority and consequently ATM has reached a very high level of safety. However, research is necessary to maintain or increase this level in the future while capacity and cost-efficiency are also being increased. Additionally, upcoming challenges like increased digitalisation and the foreseen increase of automation can change the way organizations deliver services and thus could impact upon safety and resilience. A better understanding of this influence/impact is necessary to support the design of a safe and resilient future ATM system.

Projects are expected to contribute to increase the body of knowledge of Safety and Resilience of the ATM system by identifying areas of improvement, providing design guidelines and identifying future research needs and in doing so supporting decision making regarding the research and the future design of the ATM system.