TOPIC: A1 Aviation Safety

A1.01 Vehicle-Centric 4D Trajectory and Mission Management
A1.02 Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control
A1.03 Aircraft Aging and Durability
A1.04 Aircraft Icing Avoidance and Tolerance
A1.05 Crew Systems Technologies for Improved Aviation Safety
A1.06 Aviation External Hazard Sensor Technologies
A1.07 Integrated Vehicle Health Management

The Aviation Safety Program focuses on the Nation's aviation safety challenges of the future. This vigilance for safety must continue in order to meet the projected increases in air traffic capacity and realize the new capabilities envisioned for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NGATS). The Aviation Safety Program will conduct research to improve the intrinsic safety attributes of future aircraft and to eliminate safety-related technology barriers. The program is focusing on a foundational approach to advancing knowledge in core disciplines (e.g., fluid dynamics, computational methods, material science), which in turn is used to build integrated multidisciplinary system-level models, tools, and technologies. This approach focuses on furthering our understanding of the underlying physics, chemistry, materials, etc., of aeronautics phenomena when broken down to these most basic elements. The results at the fundamental level will be integrated at the discipline and multi-discipline levels to ultimately yield system-level integrated capabilities, methods, and tools for analysis, optimization, prediction, and design that will enable improved safety for a range of missions, vehicle classes, and crew configurations. The primary areas of program interest are research directed at the detection, prediction and mitigation/management of aging-related hazards of future civilian and military aircraft; designs of revolutionary adaptive flight decks; in-flight prognosis of aircraft health, preventative and adaptive systems for in-flight operability; informed logistics and maintenance graceful recovery from in-flight failures; software safety assurance and formal verification methods for safety-critical systems; system-level integrated resilient control technologies; as well as effective vehicle-based flight/mission management under adverse, upset, and hazards conditions. NASA seeks highly innovative proposals that will complement its work in science and technologies that build upon and advance the Agency's unique safety-related research capabilities vital to aviation safety.

• Automated trajectory generation capability given a short-to-medium term time horizon;
  
• A flexible input and interface capability for the flight deck in terms of widely varying constraints, goals, costs and supporting systems;
  
• Procedural and algorithmic methods of achieving mission management goals under different and varying constraints;
  
• Working interfaces that allow a pilot to view a 4D trajectory and accept or reject it, modify and retransmit a 4D trajectory uploaded from ground-based automation systems, or generate and trial plan a 4D trajectory for air traffic control approval;
  
• Automated decision making and path planning capability that allows an aircraft to decide what particular actions are most appropriate to respond to specific situations, along with requirements for and analysis of the appropriate circumstances under which this capability should be exercised.
  

• Fault tolerance and hazard effects protection
  
• Onboard hazard effects assessment, mitigation and control recovery
  

• Damage tolerance and design for extended envelope operation
  
• Onboard hazard effects assessment, mitigation and control recovery
  

• Damage tolerance and structural damage avoidance
  
• Onboard damage detection and identification, mitigation and control recovery
  

• Control and performance management
  
• Vehicle-based mission management and autonomous collision avoidance
  
• Interface and communication management
  
  

• Software safety assurance methods for complex avionics systems
  
• Integrated V&V methods, tools, and test techniques for adaptive control systems
  
• Predictive capability assessment methods and tools
  

• The use of integral metallic structure in airframe application provides unique crack growth and fracture characteristics that are not consistent with traditional metallic structure characteristics. Computational methods for elasto-plastic crack propagation, including non-self-similar growth and bifurcation of 2D and 3D cracks, are needed for predicting crack growth in complex metallic geometries. Computational methods must be incorporated into a user interface software tool.
  
• Computational methods for the prediction of strength of composite and metal/composite hybrid skin-stringer fuselage present the following technical challenges: numerical regularization techniques to improve convergence of delamination propagation simulation; and X-FEM for failure prediction that address interaction between in-plane and interlaminar failure modes. Solutions to these two challenges are sought.
  
• Novel techniques for large-area nondestructive evaluation (detection of damage and material degradation) of metallic and composite fuselage and wing structure are needed.
  
• Adhesive bonds are critical to integrity of built-up structure. Disbonds (i.e., gaps) can often be detected, but the strength of the adhesion between surfaces in contact is not obvious. Methods to detect bond degradation, predict disbond growth, and characterize weak bonds are needed.
  
• Advanced composite concepts for jet engine containment structures have unknown long-term service/environment effects. Better models and tools are needed for understanding these effects and for predicting engine blade-off event physics (i.e., the high strain-rate impact) to reduce risk and cost.
  
• New nickel-based superalloys which enable higher turbine disk operating temperatures have been developed. However, tools to understand and mitigate the long term durability and aging characteristics (e.g., microstructural instability and corrosion) of these alloys are needed.
  
• Degradation and damage that develops over time in engine hot section components can lead to catastrophic failure. Methods and sensors for characterization of degradation processes of these components (including ceramics) in harsh environments during system development are needed.
  
• Faults and hazards in aging vehicle wiring persist as a problem in legacy vehicles, and will pose risks in new vehicles. Novel methods (i.e., have not already been researched by FAA and DoD) are sought to detect and characterize degradation, and to predict useful life of wiring systems.
  

• Ground and airborne radome technologies for microwave wavelength radar and radiometers that remain clear of liquid water and ice in all weather situations.
  
• In situ icing environment measurement systems that can provide practical, very low-cost validation data for emerging icing weather information systems and atmospheric modeling. Measured information must include location, altitude, cloud liquid water content, temperature, and cloud particle sizing and phase information. Solutions envisioned would use radiosonde-based systems.
  
• Ice protection and detection technology submittal must provide significant improvements over current systems or address new design needs. Areas of improvement can be considered to be: efficient thermal protection systems, including composite wing or structures applications; ice sensors that provide detection and accretion rate for all possible icing conditions; wide area ice detection; detection that serves both ground and in-flight applications; ice crystal detection probe (for non-research aircraft applications); engine icing probe (that can measure Liquid Water Content and Total Water Content inside engine passages); and de-icing systems that operate at near anti-icing performance. Any submittal must be cost competitive to current technologies.
  

• Intelligent systems monitoring and alerting technologies for improved failure mode identification, recovery, and threat mitigation;
  
• Tools for aerospace vehicle interface and automation designs that prevent, detect, and mitigate the effects of human-error;
  
• Tools and methods to support communication, and collaborative/distributed decision-making;
  
• Data fusion technologies for real-time integration and integrity checking of single source information streams of varying spatial and temporal resolution;
  
• Flight deck information management technologies and modeling capabilities;
  
• Presentation and alerting for displays and aiding devices based on integrated streams of data with various levels of integrity;
  
• Presentation and aiding concepts for the display and use of data with spatial or temporal uncertainty, or of a predictive nature;
  
• Methods, sensors, and integration algorithms for determining operator and crew states of awareness (e.g., engagement, fatigue, immersion, etc.) and situation awareness content;
  
• Tools for assessing operator characteristics that determine fitness for duty, training level, error tendencies, crew/automation interaction style, or information presentation design;
  
• Technologies that complement individual capabilities for improved performance and access as an aerospace vehicle operator;
  
• Human-centered technologies to improve the access and performance of less-experienced operators and pilots from special population groups;
  
• Methods for analyzing the safety impact of human-centered technologies, human/automation roles, and procedures (human error modeling, human reliability assessment, fault tolerant systems);
  
• Scenarios, metrics, analysis methods, and tools for aerospace vehicle human-in-the-loop assessments with improved sensitivity and external validity;
  
• Theory and formal methods for interleaving multiple (e.g., normal and emergency) procedures;
  
• Theory and formal methods for automatic generation of procedures and recovery sequences.
  

• New and improved airborne forward-looking sensor systems;
  
• Data fusion technologies for integrating disparate sources of flight-related information with on-board and off-board sensor data to detect and generate alerts of aviation hazards;
  
• Innovative technologies and methods to detect, predict, and quantify hazards in order to provide accurate information and guidance to enable pilot avoidance hazards, or to instigate strategies for mitigation;
  
• Decision-support tools and methods to improve collaborative and distributive decision-making.
  

• Airframe Health Management - including self-awareness and prognosis, anomaly detection and identification, and in-flight damage, degradation and failure mitigation;
  
• Propulsion Health Management - including self-awareness and prognosis of gas path, combustion, and overall engine state (containment systems and rotating and static components), and fault-tolerant system architectures;
  
• Aircraft Systems Health Management - including state-awareness and prognosis of landing gear, hydraulic and pneumatic systems, electrical and power systems, fuel and lubrication systems, avionics/communications, navigation, and surveillance/flight critical and flight management systems, and robust, distributed, fault-tolerant, self-recoverable architectures for flight critical aircraft applications;
  
• Environmental Hazard Management - including the prevention, detection, and mitigation of hazards such as ice accretion, lightning strikes, EMI/EMC, and ionizing radiation, as well as the direct and indirect effects of these hazards;
  
• IVHM Architectures and Databases - including system design, analysis and optimization, information management, data flow and communication, control and reconfiguration, architecture development and validation, and database development and management;
  
• Validation and Predictive Capability Assessment - including analysis, simulation, ground testing, flight-testing, environmental testing, and software assurance.
  

• Large-scale distributed anomaly, fault, malfunction, degradation, and failure detection with data/decision/information fusion (multiple sensors, actuators, and processing nodes);
  
• Prevention, detection, isolation, and mitigation of multiple independent/correlated anticipated and unanticipated failures (modeling of correlated failures and system/vehicle effects, diagnosis and prognosis, real-time processing and decision-making for very large state spaces, and health state reasoning);
  
• Adaptive diagnostic and prognostic algorithms (adapts as systems and components age, are repaired, or replaced);
  
• Analytical methods to set local decision criteria so that global performance criteria are met (multi-dimensional optimization);
  
• Performance optimization in distributed systems (high probability of detection, low probability of false alarm);
  
• Vehicle-wide state and function monitoring of systems and structures (including digital avionics, auto-flight and control, propulsion, hydraulic, mechanical, pneumatic, electrical, and power generation and distribution systems);
  
• Large-scale distributed adaptive fault-tolerant processing architecture that is robust in adverse operating environments (EMI/EMC, ionizing radiation, low/high temperatures);
  
• Distributed hierarchical threat-tolerant self-healing embedded sensors and systems (embedded self-recovery mechanisms, adaptive, programmable and reconfigurable devices);
  
• Technology integration, verification, and validation (diagnostic and prognostic flight, airframe, and propulsion systems, environmental hazard management, advanced sensors and system architectures, V&V with predictive capability).
  

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