What is Project #4 about?

P4 “Total system risk assessment” works to develop a prototype risk observatory to assess and monitor safety risks throughout the Total Aviation System and allow frequent update to the assessment of risks. This Technical Project builds on the progress made in five major programs (CATS in Netherlands, AIM in SESAR and EUROCONTROL, ISAM and ASIAS in the FAA, and the EC FP7 project ASCOS) and brings the results of these programs together to develop a permanent risk observatory for Europe. It thus relies on existing means for safety risk assessment and continuous safety performance monitoring, and will develop a next generation of safety assessment techniques.

The risk observatory will acquire, fuse and structure safety data (which can include data from normal operations) and translate it to actionable safety information: output that helps the user to distil safety intelligence to allow the implementation of appropriate measures to positively influence safety - i.e. reducing the serious incident and accident probability. The core of the risk observatory is formed by a risk assessment framework that integrates risk assessment models specifically developed to represent a certain domain. The risk observatory will also offer the ability to make queries for a specific context. This makes the observatory of interest to a diverse group of users from both authorities and service providers.

P4 addresses Theme 2 “Strengthening the capability to manage risks”, that conducts research on processes and technologies to enable the aviation system actors to achieve near-total control over the safety risk in the air transport system.

Project Manager: NLR

P4 “Total system risk assessment” is divided in 4 technical Work Packages.

WP4.1 - Risk observatory requirements

The objectives of this Work Package are to define business, user and system requirements for the risk observatory, depicting a preliminary architecture for the system to understand its behaviour, and provide suggestions for the risk assessment model developments of each domain in order to ensure a seamless integration into the risk observatory.

WP4.2 - Risk assessment within domains

The main goal of WP4.2 is to develop an aviation safety risk framework for both proactive and predictive safety management. This work package will develop the modules of this safety monitoring capability. The modules will be developed for the following domains: ANSPs, aircraft operators and aircraft manufacturers.

The models will be developed with in mind the eventual mid-/long-term objective that the risk observatory will be a near real-time safety performance evaluation and monitoring system.

WP4.3 - Integrated risk assessment framework

The objective of this WP is to integrate the domain-specific risk assessment modules (WP4.2) with modules representing the interfaces between domains to acquire an integrated risk assessment framework. The integration of the domain-specific risk assessment models implies the need to characterise events and associated probabilities, as well as the integration of dynamic complex systems into distinct modules. These modules are then interconnected though interface modules, which are crucial in the development of the full risk assessment framework.

WP4.4 - Prototype risk observatory development

The objective of this WP is to develop a prototype of a risk observatory for safety monitoring and to obtain frequent risk pictures for the aviation system. The prototype risk observatory is the product that embeds the integrated risk assessment framework from WP4.3, including the models from WP4.2, and populates it with historical and actual data.

A risk observatory will offer the clues as to where the opportunities arise for risk prevention and mitigation. Therefore the observatory will be an enabling tool to be able to reduce accident rate, andthat offers analysis of safety performance, identification of safety trends and key risk areas that can be most efficiently mitigated.

P34 is expected to produce/develop:

• Risk assessment model for ANSPs;
• Risk assessment model for aircraft operators;
• Risk assessment model for aircraft manufacturers;
• Integrated risk assessment framework;
• Prototype risk observatory.