Resilience engineering to assess risks for the air traffic management system: a new systemic method

Abstract

For current socio-technical systems, the need for enhanced methods and models for safety management emerges owing to their increasing inherent complexity. The Air Traffic Management (ATM) system represents one of these systems, for which a new perspective is mandatory in terms of safety management. The traditional perspective on safety (Safety-I) has to be reinforced with a new one (Safety-II), integrating the principles of Resilience Engineering. This latter, recurrent in several domains, is receiving an increasing interest in the area of safety and risk management over the past decade. This paper aims to develop a new method, i.e. the RAG-SAT (Resilience Analysis Grid - State Assessment Tool), to combine the principles of Safety-I and Safety-II. It combines a semi-quantitative analysis of system functioning, linking directly resilience with system state and then system risk exposure. The RAG-SAT integrates the technical, human, procedural and environmental aspects of the ATM system, following the Air Navigation Service Provider's (ANSP) perspective. The method is discussed following an explorative conceptual perspective.