Safety and sensitivity analysis of the advanced airspace concept for nextgen

Abstract

This paper presents a model and methodology for a safety and sensitivity analysis of the Advanced Airspace Concept. This analysis is part of a larger effort to analyze safety-capacity tradeoffs in NextGen concepts. A key part of the model is the definition of a dynamic event tree, which is like a standard event tree, but also includes the dimension of time in the state-space description. The model is constructed and evaluated in an automated fashion based on a set of input tables. Thus, changes to the model are easily implemented and results are automatically recomputed. The analytical implementation can be evaluated fairly quickly (a couple seconds per evaluation). A systematic sensitivity analysis shows that the transponder failure probability is a critical model parameter.