A Safety and Human-Centered Approach to Developing New Air Traffic Management Tools

This paper describes a safety-driven, human-centered process for designing and integrating new components into an airspace management system. The general design of a conflict detection function currently being evaluated by Eurocontrol is being used as the testbed for the methodology, although the details differ somewhat. The development and evaluation approach proposed is based on the principle that critical properties must be designed into a system from the start. As a result, our methodology integrates safety analysis, functional decomposition and allocation, and human factors from the very beginning of the system development process. It also emphasizes using both formal and informal modeling to accumulate the information needed to make tradeoff decisions and ensure that desired system qualities are satisfied early in the design process when changes are easier and less costly. The formal modeling language was designed with readability as a primary criterion and therefore the models can act as an unambiguous communication medium among the developers and implementers. The methodology is supported by a new specification structuring approach, called Intent Specifications, that supports traceability and documentation of design rationale as the development process proceeds.