Contingency Planning Toolkit for Advanced Air Mobility

NASArsquo;s Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) concepts envision increasing autonomy, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to maintain operational efficiency while ensuring safety. Increasing autonomy while maintaining or improving efficiency and safety will require effective teaming between humans and automation in routine and contingency operations. The UAM and AAM concepts describe procedures for addressing contingencies, implicitly assuming automation will be able to coordinate well enough to address contingencies, with little or no human input, if procedures are pre-defined. However, if traditional air traffic operations are to be a guide, humans will need to be involved in coordinated contingency planning for UAM/AAM operations.To address the need for coordinated contingency planning in UAM/AAM, we propose Contingency Planning Toolkit for Advanced Air Mobility (CPT AAMO), a collection of procedures and software for contingency planning and management and processes and capabilities to evaluate proposed procedures to support research, development, and certification. Its design is based on a systematic analysis of potential allocations of contingency planning functions. Metrics include function allocation coherency, operational tempo, and coordination load, enabling us to assess each candidate architecture according to properties like safety, resilience, equity, integration, and resistance to cyber-attack. This effort fills a gap in AAM concept development, providing appropriate architectures and function allocations for contingency planning in a highly automated system.In Phase I, Mosaic ATM proved the feasibility of our approach and derived functional and information requirements for various entities within the UAM ecosystem. In Phase II, we propose to harden and expand the offerings in the CPT AAMO Toolkit, maturing from concept exploration to early technical implementation, preparing the innovation for commercialization.