Air Traffic Management Concept Baseline Definition - The Boeing ...

2.2 Consensus Future System Development Needs
The FAA’s R,E&D Advisory Committee met in Washington in September (U.S. FAA,
1997) to recommend research needs for the FAA to facilitate system modernization. High
priority recommendations centered on the need for improved system development
methods with emphasis on systems engineering, software engineering and human factors.
Other issues which received numerous citations included programmatic and management
concerns, emphasis on information technologies, need to provide enhanced levels of
system capacity, safety and security. Finally, the group agreed that a key priority is the
need for credible investment analysis. The systems engineering, software engineering and
human factors issues form the core of the discussion on system modernization, which
provides the framework for the following discussions on concept of operations, human
factors and technology assessment, and transition planning and system alternatives
evaluation. These preliminary design activities are key to the establishment of a system
architecture and the associated research needs, which supports the needed air
transportation needs of capacity, safety and efficiency of operation for the next twenty
years.
Another issue central to the discussions of the R,E&D Advisory Committee was the lack
of a mandate for system modernization. The airlines, military, general aviation (GA) and
business segment of the industry often disagree on specific technology decisions, as well
as policy issues. The concern is that the industry lacks agreement on the high level
objectives of system modernization and the mission needs of the system, which should
drive the technical requirements, concept of operation and system architecture. The
approach identified in this section focuses on the preliminary design phase of the system
development life cycle, and the need to clearly identify the long range mission needs of the
system. It also examines tools and methods to allocate requirements to subsystems, assign
functions to system agents and evaluate the performance objectives over the twenty year
life of the system.
2.3 Systems Engineering and Preliminary Design
Figure 2.1 summarizes the system engineering steps which divide the life cycle of a major
system development into phases: definition of requirements and objectives, analysis of
functions and operations, definition of system architecture, design of the system and
subsystem elements, production of the system elements, integration of the system in the
laboratory of integration and validation testing, certification, and system operation and
maintenance. The discipline of the systems engineering process is vital to the successful
completion of an airplane development program, where a large team of thousands of
engineers must work a complex, real-time, human-in-the-loop, safety critical system
development to produce and certify a system integrating subsystems containing hundreds
of thousands of line of code and a system architecture of data busses linking hundreds of
‘Line Replaceable Units’ of differing criticality. The development of a major ATC system
upgrade may be an order of magnitude more complex, because it shares the safety
criticality and human-in-the-loop real-time nature of the airplane development, and further
requires that the existing system remain operational while supporting transition to the new
system.
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