NASA System-Wide Safety (SWS) Project

Amendment 3 to the NASA ARMD Research Opportunities in Aeronautics – 2018 (ROA-2018) NRA has been posted on the NSPIRES web site at http://nspires.nasaprs.com. Research proposals are sought in five subtopic areas for Appendix B.5 in support of the System-Wide Safety (SWS) Project.

The System-Wide Safety (SWS) Project uses new research tools, innovative technologies, and operational methods to safely enable the transformation of aviation to make flight more efficient and accessible, even as the global demand for air transportation services steadily increases.  The primary research focus is to develop technologies to enable in-time, system-wide safety. The project also conducts research to create safety-related advances in methods used for the verification and validation of advanced, increasingly autonomous systems.

The project has two primary goals.  The first goal is to explore, discover and understand how safety could be affected by the growing complexity of advanced aviation systems designed to improve the efficiency of flight, and the increasing number and type of aircraft – piloted and otherwise – available to an ever-growing number and type of customers. The second goal is to develop and demonstrate the research tools, innovative technologies and operational methods that will proactively mitigate those potential risks in order to maintain the aviation industry’s unparalleled safety record. 

SWS activities are directed toward building a system of expanded safety awareness that includes increased access to relevant data, integrated analysis capabilities, improved in-time detection and alerting of hazards, full decision support and automated safety mitigation strategies.  The primary research focus of this NRA call is to develop and demonstrate cost-efficient verification and validation methods that provide justifiable confidence in safety claims for designs of complex ATM/avionics systems, including increasingly autonomous, non-deterministic systems.

NOIs are due 06/03/2019 and Proposals are due 07/16/2019.