Abstract
The Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) is a NASA project aimed at increasing access to small non-towered non-radar airports in the US. SATS is a radical new approach to air traffic management where pilots flying instrument flight rules are responsible for separation without air traffic control services. In this paper, the SATS project serves as a case study of an operational air traffic concept that has been designed and analyzed primarily using formal techniques. The SATS concept of operations is modeled using non-deterministic, asynchronous transition systems, which are then formally analyzed using state exploration techniques. The objective of the analysis is to show, in a mathematical framework, that the concept of operation complies with a set of safety requirements such as absence of dead-locks, maintaining aircraft separation, and robustness with respect to the occurrence of off-nominal events. The models also serve as design tools. Indeed, they were used to configure the nominal flight procedures and the geometry of the SATS airspace.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abbott, T., Jones, K., Consiglio, M., Williams, D., Adams, C.: Small Aircraft Transportation System, High Volume Operation concept: Normal operations. Technical Report NASA/TM-2004-213022, NASA Langley Research Center, NASA LaRC Hampton VA 23681-2199, USA (2004)
Baxley, B., Williams, D., Consiglio, M., Adams, C., Abbott, T.: The Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS), Higher Volume Operations (HVO) off-nominal operations. In: Proceedings of the AIAA 5th Aviation, Technology, Integration, and Operations Conference, AIAA-2005-7461, Arlington, Virginia (2005)
Chan, W., Anderson, R., Beame, P., Burns, S., Modugno, F., Notkin, D., Reese, J.: Model checking large software specifications. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 24(7), 498–520 (1998)
Consiglio, M., Carreño, V., Williams, D., Muñoz, C.: Conflict prevention and separation assurance method in the Small Aircraft Transportation System. In: Proceedings of the AIAA 5th Aviation, Technology, Integration, and Operations Conference, AIAA-2005-7463, Arlington, Virginia (2005)
Dowek, G., Muñoz, C., Carreño, V.: Abstract model of the SATS concept of operations: Initial results and recommendations. Technical Report NASA/TM-2004-213006, NASA Langley Research Center, NASA LaRC,Hampton VA 23681-2199, USA (2004)
Henzinger, T., Ho, P.-H., Wong-Toi, H.: HyTech: A model checker for hybrid systems. Software Tools for Technology Transfer 1, 110–122 (1997)
Leveson, N., Heimdahl, M., Hildreth, H., Reese, J.: Requirements specification for process-control systems. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 20(9), 684–707 (1994)
Maddalon, J., Butler, R., Geser, A., Muñoz, C.: Formal verification of a conflict resolution and recovery algorithm. Technical Report NASA/TP-2004-213015, NASA Langley Research Center, NASA LaRC,Hampton VA 23681-2199, USA (April 2004)
Massink, M., De Francesco, N.: Modelling free flight with collision avoidance. In: Proceedings 7th IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, pp. 270–280 (2001)
Muñoz, C., Carreño, V., Dowek, G., Butler, R.W.: Formal verification of conflict detection algorithms. International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer 4(3), 371–380 (2003)
Muñoz, C., Dowek, G., Carreño, V.: Modeling and verification of an air traffic concept of operations. Software Engineering Notes 29(4), 175–182 (2004)
Owre, S., Rushby, J.M., Shankar, N.: PVS: A prototype verification system. In: Kapur, D. (ed.) CADE 1992. LNCS, vol. 607, pp. 748–752. Springer, Heidelberg (1992)
Siminiceanu, R., Ciardo, G.: Formal verification of the NASA runway safety monitor. Electronic Notes Theoretical Computer Science 128(6), 179–194 (2005)
Yates, R., Andrews, J., Gray, P.: Practical experience applying formal methods to air traffic management software. In: Proceedings of the 8th Annual International Symposium of the International Council on Systems Engineering, Vancouver, Canada (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Muñoz, C., Carreño, V., Dowek, G. (2006). Formal Analysis of the Operational Concept for the Small Aircraft Transportation System. In: Butler, M., Jones, C.B., Romanovsky, A., Troubitsyna, E. (eds) Rigorous Development of Complex Fault-Tolerant Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4157. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11916246_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11916246_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-48265-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48267-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)