Effects of Aircraft Health on Airspace Safety

This manuscript investigates the effects of aircraft health on the surrounding airspace, and proposes a methodology to understand how different aircraft-level faults (system faults, communication faults, etc.) can adversely affect the safety of the airspace, and qualitatively assess the impact of such faults on airspace safety metrics (such as congestion, controller/pilot workload, etc.). The topic of systems health management deals with continuously monitoring the performance of an engineering system, identifying and detecting the presence of faults, predicting the growth/progression of faults, computing the remaining useful life, and aiding online decision-making for the robust, continued operation of such engineering systems. The topic of real-time airspace modeling and safety analysis deals with defining and computing safety metrics for airspace operations in order to support risk-informed decision-making activities for various airspace entities including pilots, air traffic controllers, airlines, etc. This report presents recent research efforts that focus on combining multiple aspects of the aforementioned topics, and investigates the impact of aircraft-level faults on the airspace safety