Dynamic Path Planning Automation Architecture for Advanced Air Mobility: Application of a New MBSE Approach to System Architecture Development

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) aims to develop an air transportation system for novel air vehicles between local, regional, and intraregional places. Safety and efficiency of increasingly complex AAM operations are expected to require extensive use of automation, ranging from controlling the revolutionary new aircraft to managing the flight paths dynamically in high tempo airspace and aerodrome operations. This document describes the architecture of a dynamic path planning (DPP) automation system in the context of increasingly autonomous operations. The purpose of the DPP automation system is to build, coordinate, and maintain a safe, efficient, and operationally acceptable flight path throughout the flight. To meet the challenges of the evolving AAM operations, the DPP automation system must not only adapt autonomously to the dynamic operating environment, but also respond to potential mission changes, aircraft commands, and user instructions. A comprehensive, rigorous, and flexible architecture is paramount to meeting these complex requirements in the design and development of future DPP automation systems. The DPP automation system architecture will offer guidance to the industry, certification authorities, and service providers in establishing best design practices, community standards, and means of compliance recommendations for industrywide adoption of dynamic path planning automation systems.

A new model-based systems engineering approach was developed to architect a DPP automation system. The fundamental steps in this approach are the development of conceptual, functional, logical, and physical architectures of the system to a level of depth that is suitable for designing the system. The conceptual architecture comprises: identifying the primary stakeholders and their concerns; analyzing the stakeholder concerns to derive system goals; defining the system boundary and interfaces in the operational domain; refining the system goals as a set of use cases and measures of performance; and extracting the top-level system requirements. These behavioral and structural elements are then decomposed in the functional architecture in order to derive detailed requirements of the DPP automation system. The system requirements serve as the basis for developing an implementation-agnostic logical architecture of the DPP automation system and its parts, namely, the flight path initialization, flight path creation, flight path monitoring, flight path evaluation, flight path revision, flight path coordination, input data processing, output data processing, flight contingency management, and supporting subsystems. The key features of the new methodical approach are its simplicity, rigor, and extensibility to disparate automation systems in aviation, space, and science domains.