Completion of Integrated Communications, Navigation and Surveillance (ICNS) Phase 2

On September 16, 2009, the Raytheon team and the government team held the final review of the ICNS study.  Phase 2 of the ICNS study focused on the analysis of the  four operational scenarios and use cases developed in Phase 1 of the study.  Analyses included:  the development of critical functional, performance and interoperability requirements and enablers; an assessment of the extent of change for ICNS operational improvements and enablers; the development of alternative ICNS architectures; and an analysis of the alternatives.  The analyses clearly identified the strong dependencies between the C, N, and S functionality and the NextGen operational capabilities.

The study showed that implementing NextGen capabilities, such as Trajectory Based Operations, Self Separation, Super Density Terminal Operations, depends on a highly reliable application of CNS resources. The current ICNS architecture provides single thread implementation of crucial information flows, and failure of any single element can have wide ranging impacts on the far-term NextGen system implementation.The analyses yielded a tremendous amount of useful information the JPDO can utilize to improve the Joint Planning Environment (JPE), and to work with stakeholder communities on specific topics of interest.

The all-day Phase 2 review was well attended by government team members as well as by representatives from the JPDO Working Groups.  The large group had a very lively and productive discussion of the analyses that were performed and certainly provided grist for the mill for additional study.  And beyond the specific results of the study, the Raytheon team also concluded:  “The Raytheon’s team’s success demonstrates the value of the JPDO’s Enterprise Architecture, Integrated Work Plan and the Joint Planning Environment”.

The ICNS study is available here.

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

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

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

ICNS Task Kick-Off

The Integrated, Communications Navigation and Surveillance (ICNS) task had its official kick-off with the full government team on Tuesday, March 24.  The task was awarded through the NextGen Institute to a team lead by Raytheon Inc.  In addition to Raytheon, the team includes ARINC and Rockwell Collins to cover the avionics perspective, Thales to address global interoperability, and Aviation Management Associates for the development of operational scenarios.

The task was developed in response to feedback from the Navigation Backup study performed last year.  The task investigates the far-term functional, performance, and interoperability requirements for ICNS.  The interaction among the modes is also included.  In phase one of the task, Raytheon will develop operational scenarios to describe how ICNS links to the NextGen concept.  This phase will be completed at the end of April.  Phase two decomposes the scenarios into the requirements and the design trade space.  The trade space is then analyzed.  The results of phase two will be available at the end of September.

We are excited about this task, and we look forward to the results, which will be key in: 1) moving the NextGen concept forward, and 2) adding more detail to the research and policy questions needed to bring the far term into fruition.

Jay Merkle
JPDO Chief Architect

NASA Studies Integration of Advanced Vehicles into NextGen

Two industry teams under contract to NASA — one led by Raytheon and one led by Sensis — are performing detailed studies on the integration of advanced vehicles into the far-term NextGen system.  The intent is to create an approach and capability for ongoing evaluations of integrating vehicles with various performance characteristics and business cases into NextGen.  Analysis informs both potential vehicle requirements as well as the operational improvement and enabler needs of the larger NextGen system in which they will operate.  These studies also help fill a need that the JPDO has to extend the benefits and portfolio modeling performed by the Interagency Portfolio and System Analysis (IPSA) Division to include advanced fleet scenarios.   Both teams briefed their progress at the JPDO Working Group Co-Chairs meeting today.  For those with KSN access, the briefings can be found here, under the category: 20090311 Meeting.

Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director

NASA NRA Scenario Walk-Throughs

Through a NASA Research Announcement (NRA), the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate is sponsoring research efforts to help understand the issues associated with integration of advanced concepts and vehicles into NextGen.  The goal of these efforts is to help inform future research related to NextGen by NASA and the broad aeronautics community.  However, specific research objectives address issues that are applicable to the JPDO mission.  These include understanding how advanced vehicles will operate within NextGen and the tradeoffs involved for both vehicles and the ATM system.  Two efforts were funded under the NRA; one effort led by Raytheon and the other effort led by Sensis Corporation. 

The Raytheon team is taking an approach that relies heavily on the JPDO developed NextGen Enterprise Architecture (EA).  Part of the approach that each team is addressing includes developing procedures describing the operation of these vehicles within the NextGen ConOps. The Raytheon led team has developed various “use case” scenarios for the vehicles they are addressing 4 vehicle types:

•  Super Heavy Commercial Transport
• Supersonic Business Jet
• Very Light Jet (owner/operator and commercially operated)
• Lightweight, Un-crewed Aircraft System

Each scenario was set in the NextGen future environment and included a description of the specific mission, an identification of nodes (actors in the system) and associated roles, a set of preconditions and underlying assumptions, and a detailed description of the flow of activities and communications that will occur to meet the mission.

The Raytheon team and subject matter experts from the JPDO met on February 10 at the JPDO to walk through the use-case scenarios.  This involved stepping through the various missions, activity-by-activity, and performing analyses of completeness, feasibility and compatibility with the NextGen concept and architecture.

Over 25 participants were involved and the output from the walk-throughs will provide valuable information to update the use-case scenarios and ultimately to map to the NextGen architecture initially as OV-6s (an EA artifact).  Next steps include analysis of the Enablers and OI’s from the IWP to provide a detailed assessment of the impact of these advanced vehicles on NextGen.