Project Overview

Increased automation is one of the main changes foreseen by SESAR in ATM. This will pose new challenges including possible automation degradation. The premise for the SPAD project is that degradation of systems automation is unavoidable due either to internal (e.g. human, software or system failure) or external (e.g. weather, strikes, malicious behaviors) events (or both).

There is thus a need to understand, monitor and manage how automation degradation of a single system may propagate to the overall ATM system, and to define ways to confine and absorb degradation problems, with and without human contribution. There is also a need to estimate the implications of degradations for the overall ATM system performances.

These aspects will be investigated by SPAD, which has the following aims:

1) Understanding, modelling and estimating the propagation of automation degradation in ATM

2) Estimating the consequences of automation degradation on ATM performances

3) Supporting an effective intervention for the containment of automation degradation.

Various models and their contribution as a federation to the understanding of impact of degradations