NASA SBIR 2008 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Scientific Systems Company, Inc.
500 West Cummings Park, Suite 3000
Woburn, MA 01801 - 6562
(781) 933-5355

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Jovan D Boskovic
Jovan.Boskovic@ssci.com
500 West Cummings Park Suite 3000
Woburn, MA 01801 - 6562
(781) 933-5355

Expected Technology Readiness Level (TRL) upon completion of contract: 2

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) strives to transform the existing National Airspace System (NAS) into the safest, most efficient system feasible. This proposal addresses the automated surface traffic and resource planning for the NextGen Airportal concept. Current system is primarily reliant on manual planning and human decision making with minimal computer support. The proposed Collaborative Aircraft Planning System (CAPS) will implement advanced evolutionary algorithms to achieve Airportal usage optimality in real-time while maintaining the required safety margins in aircraft separation and conflict resolution. CAPS will be designed to be flexible to accommodate future aircraft capabilities and equipage, modeling of arbitrary pre-requisite and post-requisite resource requirements, weather driven changes in Airportal constraints, and will be scalable to larger metro-plexes of multiple airportals while maintaining real-time planning capabilities. CAPS will also provide intuitive graphical operator interfaces with enhanced visualization and safety alert capabilities.

SSCI will leverage its expertise and past experience in implementing evolutionary algorithms for large planning problems in designing the CAPS software tool. Phase II will lead to a CAPS software package delivery that can be integrated with NASA's FACET and ACES software for evaluation and demonstration.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The proposed effort directly supports the NASA Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen NGATS) and provides advanced algorithms and software tools to perform integrated NextGen Airportal traffic and resource management. Phase II deliverable software package will be designed to interface with the existing tools like FACET and ACES that NASA uses for analysis and evaluation.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
FAA and other government agencies will benefit from automated Airportal resource and traffic management through improved throughput of the airports with minimal delays. Performance based automated traffic planning will also enable efficient and safe operations of diverse aircraft types including unmanned vehicles alongside commercial flights. Besides aerospace, the proposed algorithms and software can easily be generalized towards transportation, manufacturing, logistics and military resource and asset planning.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Airport Infrastructure and Safety Guidance, Navigation, and Control Software Tools for Distributed Analysis and Simulation