Increasing Resilience through Safety Assessment in SESAR

This paper describes the approach taken to develop resilience engineering guidance for safety assessment of functional changes in air traffic management (ATM). It summarizes the process of deriving resilience principles for ATM, originating from resilience engineering concepts and transposed into ATC operations. These principles are the foundation for a method incorporating resilience engineering into safety assessment methodology (specifically the SESAR Safety Reference Material), and for providing guidance for various ATM design processes. The methodology was validated via a test case on the i4D/CTA concept. Operational examples from the application of the developed guidance to the i4D/CTA concept are provided. Initial evaluation of the guidance suggests that it 1) surfaces new issues not addressed explicitly in safety assessments or project discussions; 2) is less formal and more qualitative than traditional methods and brings the discussions of these issues closer to operational practice; and 3) provides a vocabulary and documentation means of project discussions on resilience not currently documented. The guidance thus seems to facilitate an interweaving and systemic integration of operational, management, safety, and human performance aspects, while enriching the description and assessment of emergent properties and functional changes in ATM.