RAME: A Supervisory System Enforcing Design for Safety and Mission Success

To build lower-cost and more-capable aerospace vehicles that are based on multifunctional structure and sensor systems necessitates innovative concepts and designs for assessment, test, and validation of design integrity. This, in turn, calls for a broadening of the tool set through the introduction of new kinds of design and analysis methods. To respond to this need, the proposed SBIR effort is intended to develop the Risk Assessment and Management Environment (RAME). As envisioned by Mr. Goldin, the Director of NASA, failure reports, maintenance actions, and operational experience should be tracked by tools and be used to update analytical models and data/knowledge bases in order to better predict future system performance and risk. Accordingly, RAME is intended to become a supervisory system that enforces design for safety and mission success, and enables learning from prior experiences. Unlike traditional analysis tools that play a passive role for system evaluation, RAME aims for actively escorting a system to undergo design, development, operation, and maintenance. Moreover, while its primary goal is to validate a system, RAME will facilitate validation of mathematical models, in terms of cause-effect relations, parameter values, etc., and thus be able to offer convincing risk-assessment results and risk-management recommendations.