Systems integration of Unmanned Aircraft into the National Airspace: Part of the Federal Aviation Administration Next Generation Air Transportation System

The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) is a comprehensive, ongoing transformation of the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS). NextGen will fundamentally change NAS operations by implementing advanced technologies to monitor and operate aircraft. NextGen poses substantial systems integration challenges due to numerous technical, organizational, political, and social perspectives and their complex interdependencies. Specifically, this paper addresses the challenges associated with integrating Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the NAS, utilizing systems-of-systems methodology to identify and assess the integration risks. The team started by studying simple systems-of-systems to explore how modeling such systems can be applied to more complex systems, such as NextGen. Due to NextGen's evolving nature, the team adopted a dynamic methodological roadmap to guide risk assessment. The roadmap, an iterative methodological approach, involves developing (i) a comprehensive Hierarchical Holographic Model to identify the UAS shared state variables that contribute most to potential risk resulting from UAS integration into the NAS, (ii) a list of risk scenarios that are critical for UAS integration into the NAS, (iii) a process for risk modeling, planning, assessment, management, and communication utilizing multi-objective decision tree analysis, and (iv) recommendations for applying lessons learned from analyzing UAS integration to other components of NextGen. Whereas the results of this study are focused on UAS integration into the NAS, the methodological roadmap and modeling techniques adopted in this study are general enough to be applied to other systems-of-systems supported by MITRE Corporation. The results of this study are expected to help MITRE and the FAA navigate other NAS integration challenges and benefit from the political, social and ethical implications of UAS integration.