Resilience in ATM operations: Incorporating Robustness and Resilience in Safety Assessment

Abstract

The paper describes the approach taken to analyse air traffic operations and develop robustness and resilience guidance, with a focus on resilience. It summarizes the main principles of robustness and resilience applied to ATC/ATM as developed in the SESAR JU 16.01.02 project. The on-going project aims to incorporate these principles as part of safety assessment guidance into the SESAR Safety Reference Material and formulate the principles for ATM concept design. Specifically, the following resilience aspects are discussed in detail: actual practice, procedures and techniques of all actors, goal trade-offs, adaptive capacity, human performance, capacity near margins, buffers and tolerances, coordination, complexity, coupling, interactions, tractability, cascading, control time scales, timing, pacing, and synchronization, under-specification and approximate adjustments. Operational examples to illustrate some of these principles are provided.