Mission Assurance and Risk Mitigation in the Design of Autonomous Systems using Fault Management

Fault Management (FM) is a crucial component for ensuring success in science and human spaceflight programs that have systems designed with built-in autonomy for performing complex goals while lowering operations costs. NASA uses a variety of tools to conduct its FM activities. However, these tools are varied and “silo’ed”, and require manual intervention to transfer data from output of one tool to input of another. This process is tedious, error-prone and scales poorly for large, complex systems. This prevents FM engineers from gaining insight into overall system-level design and characteristics that are the key to transparency, verifiability and efficiency of implementing and testing FM. QSI’s TEAMS® toolset facilitates the creation, evaluation and integration of FM concepts early in the design process so that adequate detection and diagnosis is built into the system design, thereby lowering the total cost of development; enhanced communication and coordination among stakeholders; reduced development risks through improved quality and traceability; and model reusability to reduce operational costs. QSI plans to develop techniques and concomitant software tools to (1) capture diverse data and multi-source FMEA information into TEAMS® for standardizing FM techniques and processes, (2) develop an FMEA exchange tool that can interchange information in various source formats, and import into TEAMS®, (3) output the TEAMS® FMECA reports and Fault Tree Analysis reports in industry standards-compliant format, and (4) support risk engineering studies, link the design trade metrics to overall system autonomy. The solution will be of interest to NASA and industry including aerospace, efficient buildings, offshore oil-and-gas, industrial automation, offshore drilling, remote research stations, shipboard systems, aviation, and space system developers. The target of the technology is also of commercial value to commercial space sectors and contractors/suppliers of NASA systems.