NASA Systems Engineering Award

NASA conducts an annual competition for a Systems Engineering Award, held in conjunction with the SAE Aero Design® Competition sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).

The contestants are teams of college students who design and construct radio-controlled model aircraft to vie for awards in three classes of flight competitions. The competition culminates in two, three-day flying events: Aero Design® West, being held in 2010 in Van Nuys, California, and Aero Design East®, being held in 2010 in Ft. Worth, Texas.

Participation in the NASA Systems Engineering Award competition is optional. It gives student teams participating in the SAE Aero Design® competition an opportunity to compete in applying best engineering practices. Winning teams receive a trophy and a $750 cash prize.

These practices are a subset of NASA Systems Engineering principles. The competing teams submit two written documents detailing the systematic tracking, control, and integration of the project’s design, construction, and testing.

Bob Pearce, Yuri Gawdiak, and George Price of the JPDO are acting for NASA in conducting this competition, including evaluation of Systems Engineering Reports from the participating teams.

For more information, go here.

NASA Planning Systems-Level Research for Environmental Impact Mitigation

Reducing aviation’s impact on the environment is a major goal of NextGen.  In the near- to mid-term, reductions in noise, emissions, and fuel-use can be made with the current and evolving fleet through operational improvements, such as more direct routing and optimized profile descents (see the JPE, Operational Improvements 0309, 0311 and 0325, for more information).  However, in the mid- to long-run, with the advent of new fuels and new aircraft design and insertion, more substantial impacts can be achieved.  NASA is planning new systems-level research to mature the most promising vehicle technologies, and achieve technology transition to industry.  Look here for a series of presentations that were provided to the National Research Council. These presentations detail this planning, and describe changes to the structure of the NASA Airspace Systems program to emphasize more systems-level research.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

JPDO Holds Quarterly Meeting with NASA

The latest quarterly meeting was held with NASA on June 12 at NASA headquarters.  Charlie Leader and Jaiwon Shin chaired the session.  A very full agenda included a discussion by NASA on programmatic changes for the FY10 budget, including the addition of the new Integrated Systems Research program and a restructuring of the Airspace Systems Program.  A brief write-up of these changes can be found here.   A status report of the Research Transition Teams was briefed, with a major focus on the transition plans that the RTTs will produce in September.

The JPDO reported on the results of the updated gap analysis, with some emphasis on the continuing importance of coming to grips with verification and validation (V&V) of complex systems.  NASA is developing research plans for V&V, but further definition of the need by JPDO is clearly needed, as well as a review of relevant efforts across the federal government.  An initial brief out of an “R&D Policy Impacts” analysis that is in the works by the JPDO was discussed.  The analysis is examining the linkages between policy assumptions and research requirements to help identify and prioritize where explicit policy assumptions are needed to support relevant technical research.  The analysis is also doing an initial assessment of post-research transition activities.  Finally, the progress toward a full NextGen Business Case was discussed.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

Presentations from NASA Workshop Posted

Last month, we told you about NASA’s second workshop on the “Integration of Advanced Concepts and Vehicles into NextGen NRA.” In this workshop, the Sensis and Raytheon teams described their vehicle design efforts, business case developments, airspace integration analyses, and safety analyses.

If you have access to the JPDO KSN, you can download all of the presentations from the workshop here.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

Successful and Productive “All Hands” Meeting

Just a quick note to say that last week’s “All Hands” Meeting was a tremendous success. We had a great turn-out at the NASA Headquarters Building in Washington, DC, including over 25 participants via teleconference. Special thanks to all of our speakers: Peggy Gervasi, Charlie Leader, Mark Andrews, Jay Merkle, and of course, our guest speaker, Dr. John Zukowsky. NASA TV taped Dr. Zukowsky’s presentation–so, if you missed it, you’ll have a chance to see a recording of his live presentation in the upcoming weeks. Be sure to check www.jpdo.gov for more details on this recording.

In the meantime, you can view all of the “All Hands” PowerPoint presentations here.  Look under “Meetings and Conferences” and “2009.”

You can also see pictures from the event here on our Web site, or here on Facebook.

David Kerr
JPDO Director, Partnership Development Division

NextGen Experiments at NASA Ames Research Center

I visited NASA Ames on May 19 to discuss advances in  trajectory synthesis and prediction, as well as to view two human-in-the-loop experiments on NextGen capabilities.  The first experiment was in dynamic airspace configuration.  Dynamic airspace configuration, or DAC, is the ability to quickly change sector boundaries to accommodate changes in traffic loading and complexity based on overall demand, weather, or other airspace resource issues.  The experiment tested several different algorithms that adjusted the sector boundaries based on changing conditions and how well controllers were able to transition between one sector configuration and the next.  The experiment should yield information on how the various algorithms performed, as well as insight into the operational and technical issues that will need to be addressed to ensure safe, smooth transitions.

The other experiment was human factors testing of cockpit merging and spacing.  The experiment was testing issues, such as the impact of weather on pilot decision making in a merging and spacing scenarios, as well as the relative ability of the pilot to manually achieve the merging and spacing constraints versus the pilot following automation commands.  The experiment should yield important information on current merging and spacing concepts and algorithms.

Both of these experiments are proving out important capabilities that will bring us closer to NextGen.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

NASA Holds Second User and Stakeholder Workshop

JPDO participated with other users and stakeholders in NASA’s second workshop on the “Integration of Advanced Concepts and Vehicles into NextGen NRA.”   In an earlier post, I described the objective of this NASA project.  In this workshop, the Sensis and Raytheon teams described their vehicle design efforts, business case developments, airspace integration analyses, and safety analyses.  The two teams took very different approaches to the project.  I would describe the Sensis approach as modeling and simulation centric, while the Raytheon team took an architectural analysis approach.  In both cases, JPDO should receive substantial value from this NASA investment since both teams are utilizing largely the same tool sets as the JPDO, including, in the case of the Raytheon team, the Joint Planning Environment.  These studies will both produce results that the JPDO can use to help update NextGen plans, as well as prove out analysis frameworks that JPDO can take advantage of in the future.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

NASA Airspace Systems Program Review

I participated in a review of NASA’s Airspace Systems Program (http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/programs_asp.htm) last Friday.  The objective of the program is to develop and demonstrate future concepts, capabilities, and technologies that will enable major increases in air traffic management effectiveness, flexibility, and efficiency, while maintaining safety, to meet capacity and mobility requirements of NextGen.  The review detailed program progress and partnership activities and highlighted technical accomplishments.  Partnership activities include the programs participation in JPDO working groups and the NASA – FAA – JPDO Research Transition Teams.  Technical accomplishments were reviewed in a variety of technical areas, including flight deck merging and spacing, integrated weather information into ATM decision support tools, dynamic airspace configuration management, wake vortex detection, prediction and spacing, airport surface trajectory management, and, trajectory prediction and synthesis.  Across the board, the work has been demonstrated to be well aligned with the JPDO developed NextGen planning documents (available on the Joint Planning Environment http://jpe.jpdo.gov/ee/) and is making substantial technical progress.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

Completion of Integrated Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (ICNS) Phase 1

On April 27th, 2009, the Raytheon team and the government team held the review of the use cases, the completion of the first phase of the ICNS contract, and the initial plan for the second, or analysis phase of the contract.  It was a long and productive day.  The teams reviewed 4 use cases with a total of 393 steps.  The first use case was an air carrier flying from Phoenix to Miami focusing on 4 dimensional trajectories.  The second use case was a flight from Miami to JFK and focused on navigational failures.  The third use case was a flight from JFK to Houston which stressed severe weather and communications.  The fourth use case was a general aviation flight from Phoenix to Jackson Hole and explored the issues with mixed equipage and staffed NextGen towers.  The discussion was lively and resulted in robust descriptions of the 2025 operation environment, and seeded thinking for phase 2, the analytic phase.  These use cases along with use cases developed by NASA, and in process for weather, and integrated surveillance are forming a library of documents that describe in more detail the operational, functional and performance attributes of the NextGen concept.

The Raytheon team has begun the analytic phase investigating functional, performance and interoperability for ICNS.  The next meeting of the two teams will be June 8, when both teams review the first set of analytic results.

Jay Merkle
JPDO Chief Architect

The JPDO Co-Funds a Task Augmentation with NASA’s Subsonic Fixed Wing Project

The JPDO’s Interagency Portfolio and Systems Analysis Division (IPSA) has co-funded a task augmentation with NASA’s Subsonic Fixed Wing Project titled: Creation of a Strategic Planning & Prioritization Process with Georgia Institute of Technology. To fully evaluate the impacts of the NextGen Enterprise Architecture, IPSA is required to run lifecycle benefit and cost analysis out to the year 2050. This long-range timeframe creates an unprecedented requirement to not only evaluate R&D technology benefits directly affecting Air Traffic Management, but also to evaluate technology transfer benefits from NextGen R&D. In addition, to insure that NextGen will be competitive in its target timeframe, an analysis of future technology trends that are both complementary and competing is required. This task will establish a process for collecting and identifying relevant technology trends that could affect the NextGen implementations, and provide an evaluation and impact framework to assess those consequences.

Yuri Gawdiak
JPDO Director, Interagency Portfolio and Systems Analysis Division