Feb 10 ‘Beyond SOA and Cloud’ Conference Postponed

Just a quick note to say that due to inclement weather in the DC-Metro area, the Feb 10 Beyond SOA & Cloud Conference has been postponed. A new date will be announced soon! We will update our Web site once Federal offices reopen: http://www.jpdo.gov.

The JPDO Support Team

NASA Holds Quarterly Meeting with JPDO

A quarterly meeting was held with NASA on January 26th at NASA Headquarters. The meeting was notable for its expansion to include FAA’s R&D organization as a way to expand the focus to more general NextGen R&D issues.  To that end, Barry Scott, Sabrina Saunders-Hodge, and Steve Bradford were in attendance from the FAA.  The agenda included a discussion of major far-term design decisions required to achieve long-term stakeholder commitments; a perspective on NASA’s new Systems Analysis, Integration and Evaluation Project and its relationship to JPDO; and in-depth discussions on approaches to achieving technology transition between NASA and FAA, including progress on current Research Transition Teams.  NASA also presented an initial look at a roadmap of upcoming simulations/demonstrations that could provide opportunity for stakeholder partnership.

Team NextGen

As we head toward Super Bowl weekend, we can expect that there will be plenty of food and drink consumed, plenty of people yelling at their TV sets, and about an equal number of people that will be happy or disappointed by the end of the day.  And it is a good bet that the winner of the game will be the team that, well, best plays like a team.  So, it is as good a time as any to reflect on the importance of teamwork.  There have been many studies on the benefits of teamwork. There has certainly been a lot written about teams. And everyone can probably recite their favorite folk wisdom… “there is no ‘I’ in team”; “great players don’t necessarily make great teams”; “teams work better when they work together”; and the list goes on.  I don’t think there is much doubt left that true teamwork is a very effective way to “move the ball.”

But even if teams are an effective construct, are they applicable for complex undertakings?  Specifically, is a team approach the way to “move the ball” for NextGen.  NextGen has been characterized as an “Enterprise of Enterprises” in that multiple distinct enterprises with their own objectives (e.g., FAA, airlines, DoD, etc.) must come together to achieve the common objectives of NextGen.  This certainly sounds like a complex undertaking.  In fact, B.E. White of the Mitre Corporation asserts that “enterprises are complex-systems” and that “enterprise evolution is driven primarily by people/organizations acting autonomously but collectively.”  Teams, with their emphasis on shared goals and mutual accountability, are often the best approach to achieve collective action across organizations.  So, a team philosophy may in fact be the right model to NextGen forward.

Furthermore, NextGen is technically composed of “System of Systems” since many distinct systems are functionally interfaced or integrated to achieve NextGen capabilities.  Here the ultimate challenge is not engineering a single system but managing the interaction among multiple systems, over long-life cycles with uncertain boundaries.  The only constant will be constantly evolving challenges.  Dr. Jeremy Kaplan of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces suggests that some of the evolving principles of systems- of-systems engineering include:  reducing friction through openness and universal access to relevant information; unity of purpose through common context and shared goals even while working independent and parallel initiatives; and processes that work on all scales.  Again, the team philosophy embraces those principles.

Now, I’m not suggesting that NextGen is one big team—but given the constructs of “Enterprise of Enterprises” and “System of Systems,” I can’t help but think of the concept of a “team of teams.”  Clearly, there is no one team that will achieve NextGen.  Many teams will be required to operate simultaneously and over time to achieve the many capabilities envisioned by NextGen. 

Think about some of the key principles of effective teams: a clear big picture context; a focus on shared goals; mutual accountability; and, delegated decision-making.  Clearly those proven principles should be promoted within teams, but given the integrated and synchronized nature of NextGen, shouldn’t they be promoted across teams as well?  What would that look like?  Transparent processes, open communications, and universal access to relevant information would ensure all teams could stay synchronized even while working independently across multiple organizations.  A flexible and iterative plan would reflect the learning and inevitable course corrections that will occur over time and across organizations.  Policies would encourage personnel to move across teams to enable better integration as well as feedback and learning through the recursive development process. For example, in recounting lessons learned from NASA’s development of the Center-Tracon Automation System (CTAS), Dr. Dallas Denery emphasizes the importance of operational personnel being able to work on the research team early in the design phase. 

Perhaps most importantly is a fundamental attitude that we are in it together.  According to Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute, “What do people do today when they don’t understand “the system”?  They try to assign responsibility to someone to fix the problem, to oversee “the system,” to coordinate and control what is happening.  It is time we recognized that “the system” is how we work together.  When we don’t work together effectively, putting someone in charge by its very nature often makes things worse, because no one person can understand “the system” well enough to be responsible.  We need to learn how to improve the way we work together, to improve “the system” without putting someone in charge, in order to make things work.”  And maybe that is the best prescription for a “team of  teams” there is.

I think there is a lot of evidence that NextGen is being accomplished through a “team of teams” approach.  Teams from across RTCA, FAA, JPDO, all of the partner agencies come together in various forms around specific issues from near-term priorities, to defining far-term trajectory-based operations, to achieving the many required capabilities, such as integrated surveillance and network centric weather information systems. Those teams must perform their function as well as see themselves as part of the larger context.  And we must ensure that information is shared and integration is supported as teams complete their mission and new teams with new missions are created.  And together, team NextGen will achieve its goal.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

Sharing Information Responsibly is a Shared Responsibility

Recent developments highlight the importance of sharing information in a responsible manner. This is true, whether that information relates to the fight against terrorism or the transformational modernization of the national air transportation system.

During the first week of the New Year, President Obama publicly accepted responsibility for flaws in the nation’s security system that created an opportunity for the Christmas Day terrorist attack. Fortunately, that attack was unsuccessful.  The flaws associated with that particular event were not necessarily a failure to collect and share intelligence, but, instead, a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that was already available.  Thus, in line with the President’s continuing responsibility in this regard, the Administration is now focused on ensuring that the intelligence community adopts new procedures to make information sharing faster and more efficient.

In 2003, the U.S. Congress enacted legislation that established the Next Generation Air Transportation System/Joint Planning and Development Office (NextGen/JPDO) initiative to help facilitate transformational modernization of the nation’s aviation system through a unique government/industry partnership.  In this context, it was realized that net-centric operations and shared information capabilities are key to the initiative’s success.  Net-centric operations enable real-time exchange of digital information at all levels of system operations (air-to-air, air-to-ground, and ground to ground) as well as with crucial satellite-based information sources.

Furthermore, because these capabilities involve real-time sharing of information and data among users, systems, and networks, there is attention to what new and required technological capabilities can be provided by the private sector.  Of course, this kind of information sharing is a challenge for the aviation community that also includes a range of information technologies, from advanced networking to entirely new approaches, such as data-tagging and cybersecurity.  Thus, success requires an alliance between several different industries, especially since net-centric operations in the aviation community on a scale such as that envisioned by the NextGen/JPDO initiative, represents one of the most profound technical and operational challenges of the 21st century. President Obama has emphasized this as a priority responsibility of his Administration as well.

What is clear from the way the Christmas Day terrorist event was thwarted and the manner in which the unique NextGen/JPDO initiative is being applied is that responsible endeavors of this type require a sharing of information.

AFCEA Symposium
In this same vein, to connect and understand the intelligence that is already available about the rapid sharing of digital information known as “information exchange,” which is vital to the success of the NextGen/JPDO initiative, the JPDO community is encouraged to attend the first annual symposium on information exchange entitled, “Beyond SOA & Cloud: Next Generation Information Exchange in High Consequence Environments.”

At this one-day symposium, participants will discuss how future technologies will work together to enable Next Generation Information Exchange, and, specifically, as it relates to NextGen.  While many people in government and industry understand this capability, in many respects, information exchange is relatively new to the aviation community.  Again, the JPDO community (government, business, the media, or the general public) will benefit greatly from this healthy experience.

Pete West
JPDO Partnership Development Division

A Special Message from the JPDO

Transformation

NextGen is a technology-enabled transformation of the Nation’s air transportation system. NextGen must achieve higher levels of system performance to meet our Nation’s demand for aviation services.  Technology is a key enabler for higher performance, and therefore, we often think of NextGen in terms of big modernization programs designed to deliver that performance: ADS-B, Datacom, and SWIM, for example.  But what often gets lost in the focus on those big programs is that transformation is about change—change to the way we deliver services; change to roles and responsibilities; change to policies and procedures—that is fundamental to translating high-performance technologies into a high-performance system.

We too often think that if we can just find the right message on the benefit of these new technologies everyone will line up behind them and support their implementation.  But change is a human-focused process that must broadly involve the people and organizational cultures at the heart of aviation: pilots, controllers, dispatchers, and other emerging operators (think UAS, for example) as well as the planners, researchers, and developers that support them.  As John Kotter, one of the nation’s leading experts on change management puts it, “People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.”  Therefore, perhaps the most critical part of the NextGen transformation is the process that enables us to show truth and influence feelings.  We must engage the intellect, creativity, and passion of aviation’s cultures.  And I would contend that means a substantial and sustained focus on prototyping, experimentation, and demonstration involving the people required to operate the system.

In a very interesting analogy to that very point, in a recent article in The New Yorker entitled, “Testing, Testing,”  Dr. Atul Gawande recounts the transformation of farming at the turn of the 20^th century, and draws analogies to the transformation that is required to achieve health care reform.  To cut to the punch line, through an extensive and continuous series of pilot programs and demonstrations involving working farms and the capture and communication of best practices through U.S.D.A. Extension Services, the U.S. went from a crisis in food production to agricultural abundance.  This process created “a feedback loop of experiment and learning and encouragement.”  The “simple but critical rule” for change was this: “What a man hears he may doubt, what he sees he may possibly doubt, but what he does himself he cannot doubt.”  That quote, from 1903, is completely in line with John Kotter’s quote from 2002!

Dr. Gawande goes on to conclude that “there are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not.”  The approach to the first type of problem is to pick a solution and charge forward.  However, “problems of the second kind, by contrast, are never solved, exactly, they are managed.”  Dr. Gawande argues that health care has both types of problems.  For example, achieving universal coverage is a problem of the first kind – pick an approach, implement, and adjust.  However, health care reform is of the second kind – it is extraordinarily complex and requires the kind of extensive and continuous experimentation that enabled the transformation of agriculture.

Aviation, too, has problems of both kinds.  The modernization of systems tend to be problems of the first kind, and the transition to new and different policies and ways of delivering service is of the second kind.  Now, to be clear, health care is not agriculture and aviation is certainly not health care.  But there are common threads in the transformation of these complex systems—among them the need for continuous and extensive experimentation; the need to be inclusive of the people and cultures that comprise the systems; the need for feedback and learning; and, the need for flexibility to change plans and directions as required.

So, let’s make sure we keep both modernization and transformation in our sights—together they will get us to the NextGen system that our Nation needs.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

JPDO’s FY10 Work Plan Posted

The JPDO has posted its FY10 Work Plan to the Collateral Library of our Web site.  Click here to download the plan.  The major thrusts of the plan are to “Continuously Improve the Joint Planning Environment; Mature NextGen Portfolio Analysis; and Facilitate Interagency Actions and Initiatives”.

Specific technical priorities are listed in the plan, and a management roadmap of major milestones is included.  As in the past, we will update the plan on a monthly basis to reflect accomplishments and issues.  An innovation for this year is an interactive management roadmap on the KSN that will link completed milestones to the evidence of accomplishment.  Also, the closeout of last year’s plan is available here.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

Progress on V&V

Current methods to assure that fielded systems are safe and perform as expected will be inadequate for some of NextGen’s more complex capabilities involving distributed, software intensive systems.  Use of current methods in such instances could cost more and take more time than the rest of the design and implementation phases put together.  Better methods are required, or such complex capabilities will not be feasible.  These issues led the JPDO to list the V&V of complex systems as a high priority interagency focus area.

Through the JPDO Board of Directors, we requested that NASA assess the problem space in partnership with other JPDO partner agencies and develop a research plan that could address NextGen challenges. In response, at the recent NASA Aviation Safety Program Technical Conference, a full day V&V session was held that presented the results of NASA’s assessment and their formulation of a research plan.  NASA articulated that the goal of the assessment was to “examine the research required to develop transformative safety V&V methods needed to rigorously assure the safety of Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) developments in a time- and cost-effective manner.”

The objectives NASA developed for the research were:  “1)  Meet the JPDO’s critical interagency needs associated with V&V research in support of NextGen transformation; 2) Demonstrate advanced methods to answer relevant questions from aviation community; 3) Reduce barriers to innovation associated with safety V&V; and 4) Develop V&V methods for safety throughout the entire life cycle.”  NASA grouped their findings and detailed research thrusts into four challenge areas:  “1) Argument-Based Safety Assurance; 2) Distributed Systems; 3) Authority and Autonomy; and, 4) Software Intensive Systems”.

NASA also released a NASA Research Announcement (NRA) to solicit research proposals in support of the V&V thrusts.  The detailed briefings and the NRA can all be downloaded here.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

How Should NextGen Perform Information Exchange?

A response to a previous blog, which asked the following questions:

“How should NextGen perform information exchange?  Specifically, how do we adopt a services-oriented approach to federating existing networks that accommodate transparent, timely, and safe exchange of authoritative data between all appropriate constituents of the National Airspace System (NAS)?”

The questions posed are about “how” – how to do information exchange, how to adopt a service-oriented approach. However, before diving into that, I suggest that “what” and “why” are just as important. What information is to be exchanged? Who is involved? What are the operational requirements? What policies must be accounted for? And, finally, is it worth the effort?

The astute reader may remark, “You’re in danger of missing the point. We need a big-picture solution that works for all cases, some we don’t even know about today. If we get bogged down in too many details, we’ll end up with a patchwork of near-term solutions that don’t scale.” It’s a valid concern. Still, without exploring some specifics, we can’t be sure that we’re solving even today’s problems, let alone tomorrow’s. Concepts of Operation, scenarios, use cases, etc. – and, specifically, the net-centric aspects of these – are an important part of working out the “what” and “why” details.

We need to do a tricky thing, which is to apply “top-down design” and “bottom-up design” in parallel. That is, we need to iterate between designing for the big picture and designing for the specific needs. When both those efforts meet in the middle, like railways converging from the east and the west, you can hope to have a good, total solution. At the “bottom-up” end, this approach requires selecting a manageable set of specific problems… a good topic for another day.

Having said all that, this would be a poor post if it didn’t make some attempt to address the questions as posed, so here goes.

A key element in working out the big-picture “how” is to reference well-accepted, mature standards to the maximum extent possible. There is no way that multiple federal organizations and industry partners are going to agree on a common vendor or platform (nor would this be beneficial at the macro-system level). Therefore, the best path to interoperability is for the partners to agree on standards that define compliant interfaces between them.

In fact, standards may become so critical to success that it becomes appropriate for NextGen as a collective group to apply pressure to move the necessary standards toward maturity. If we get stalled by insufficient standards for NextGen, the result will be a failure to interconnect, interoperate, and make progress, period. In other words, everyone loses, even vendors that might in other situations benefit from proprietary offerings, because it’s just not feasible that the entire NextGen space will buy into a proprietary solution. The investment timelines are too long, the partners too diverse.

I wouldn’t say that any applications are “easy,” but some are more straightforward than others. For example, exchanging weather information is relatively free of identity management and privacy concerns, and has relatively achievable QoS requirements (e.g., delay of a minute or two in updating a forecast seems acceptable). This combination of factors has permitted weather information exchanges to make quite impressive progress, thanks also of course to the efforts of many dedicated individuals. The JPDO Weather Working Group and associated programs have met most of their requirements for “infrastructure-level” standards (so far) by referencing existing industry standards such as XML, SOAP, and ebXML. (For weather, the “information level” is more interesting, bringing in organizations like OGC and standards like WXXM, but that’s a bit off-topic.)

Other applications, however, are likely to have more stringent information exchange requirements, for example: real-time traffic data, trajectory and airspace negotiations, emergency response coordination, etc. In such cases, it will be more challenging to identify (or develop) an acceptable set of infrastructure-level standards and agreements. Key areas are likely to include authentication/authorization, information assurance, infrastructure provisioning and monitoring, and quality of service. I’m sure this list is not complete. Even among standards, “the devil’s in the details.” What standards should be selected? In what areas are standards insufficient today? Exploring specific standards areas could be a productive next step.

Standards are a part of the solution. However, answering the questions posed will require many other aspects, large and small, to come together. Perhaps the most important step toward a complete answer is to continue building and resourcing a collaborative team focused on the challenge.

David Rinehart
Senior Systems Architect

Just Think…

Louis Uchitelle, in his article “Entering the Superproject Void” (New York Times – 11/28/2009), made an excellent point about “giant public works projects” that “have altered the American landscape” through generations.  And, he correctly highlighted that “the strongest periods of economic growth in America have generally coincided with big outlays for new public works and the transformations they bring once completed.”  However, he missed the mark when observing that, “For the first time in memory, the nation has no outsize public works project underway.”

Actually, given the writer’s clear and commendable interest in encouraging investment (public and private) in such projects because of the need to repair, strengthen, and enhance the nation’s infrastructure and economy, it is unfortunate that he missed an opportunity to emphasize the value and magnitude of the Congressionally mandated Next Generation Air Transportation System/ Joint Planning and Development Office (NextGen/JPDO) initiative in this context.  The focus of NextGen/JPDO–transformational modernization of the aviation system–is, indeed, a critically important and “giant” endeavor.  Furthermore, the NextGen/JPDO initiative has been “underway” since 2003 and relevant government and industry leaders are committed to it.

Although it has been suggested that an opportunity was also missed when the stimulus package enacted in early 2009 provided insufficient investment for “big projects” (including NextGen/JPDO), statements of Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and Vice President Biden’s chief economist Jared Bernstein, referenced by Uchitelle, give reason to expect that the funding believed necessary will be provided.  Concerning a particular outsize public works project, Governor Rendell was quoted as saying, “Just think about a high-speed rail system for the country.  Think what it would mean for steel factories, concrete factories, asphalt factories, electrical equipment factories.  It would mean a massive amount of orders and a lot of economic growth.”  In terms of “megaprojects” Bernstein was quoted as saying, “We are on the eve of making truly significant and lasting down payments that are going to plant some lasting seeds.”

Well, “just think” about a modernized aviation system for the country that applies existing technologies more effectively and leverages new technologies such as satellite-based navigation, surveillance and network-centric systems.  Just think what such a system, with improved safety, access, capacity, predictability, and operational efficiency, would mean for the country (particularly related labor, manufacturers, operators, and users).  A steady, deliberate, highly collaborative, and properly funded NextGen/JPDO initiative would surely “plant some lasting seeds” for maintaining and enhancing the national aviation system’s already significant contribution to the economy and transportation infrastructure.  And, “just think” … wouldn’t that be “super?”

Pete West
JPDO Partnership Development Division