FARO, goodbye and see you soon!

Today we celebrated the closure meeting of FARO (https://faro-h2020.eu). FARO was a SESAR Exploratory Research 4- funded project. FARO stands for “saFety And Resilience guidelines for aviatiOn” and it came from the Latin word for lighthouse, as an ancient sign of safety in transport. This project addressed the evaluation of the impact of changes in the ATM system on resilient performance and safety. To do this, it was necessary to research on how safety is provided and produced by the ATM system, before and after a change in the system is deployed.

This project has received funding from the SESAR Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 892542 under European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. FARO project results can be found at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/892542/results.

FARO Consortium was formed by CRIDA A.I.E. , Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ( Grupo de Investigación Navegación Aérea ), 瑞典兰德大学 , Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering - University of Belgrade , EUROCONTROL , ENAIRE and ZenaByte .

Air Traffic Management’s main objective is to achieve safe and efficient operations. This comes at a cost and sustaining performance on a daily basis as required under a variety of conditions is called resilient performance. FARO’s objective was to define new methodologies for quantifying the impact on safety and resilient performance of changes in the system applying data-driven techniques integrated with Resilience Engineering principles. FARO also integrated these approaches presenting a combined view of both.

FARO methodologies targeted the en-route operating environments, evaluating different types of Use Cases. Adopting FARO methodologies provides additional tools for organisations for analysing the impact of changes in their working systems on safety and resilient performance, and also for understanding the interdependencies between traditional approaches to Safety and Resilience Engineering.

The main achievements of the project are enumerated as follows:

1. The identification of a Safety and Resilience Conceptual Framework.
2. The development of ML-based algorithms for the exploitation of extant airprox reports to identify hidden factors contributing to safety and resilient performance, as well as initial models for evaluating the contribution of the different agents in safety-related occurrences.
3. The conceptual definition of the Safety Performance Functions as well as their technical representation in the form of a hyper-structures of Bayesian Belief Networks. In addition, the project showcased methodologies to exploit the SPFs as well as visualisation artifacts to convey the complex information to simpler forms.
4. The development of a Baseline Model for resilience in ATM and a methodology for the elicitation of indicators of resilient performance indicators as an approach towards quantification in Resilience Engineering.
5. The development of a conceptual model (SEESAW) aiming for the integration of Safety and Resilient Performance. In addition, the project also developed a technical Safety and Resilience Bayesian Belief Network (SR-BBN) integrating safety and resilience variables identified as the most relevant in describing the resilient performance. The results are shown in the Validation Report.
6. Finally, as a final research product of FARO, the project produced the Safety and Resilience Guidelines. This work is a set of guidelines for applying the methodologies presented in FARO.

As main conclusions:

1. Safety Performance Functions and the technical approach selected by the project have demonstrated provision of a non-linear safety quantification methodology, flexible, and capable of accommodating different types of precursors of safety-related occurrences.
2. FARO demonstrated that Resilience Engineering can adopt quantitative methods complementing the current qualitative approach. FARO showed evidence about how quantitative aspects of performance can be documented, being able to represent an understanding of the systems under study that went beyond a qualitative narrative of the strategies of the system agents and actors.
3. The integration between Safety and Resilience Engineering through the methods proposed by FARO has the potential to facilitate the understanding and evaluation of interdependencies between competing goals. These methods facilitate the understanding on how a change in the operating system (human, technology, organisations) can impact in the balance between safety and resilient performance.

FARO team members were:

• CRIDA: Christian E Verdonk Gallego (Project Coordinator), Chen Xia , Icíar García-Ovies Carro
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid: Fernando Gómez Comendador, Rosa Arnaldo Valdés, Raquel Delgado-Aguilera Jurado , María ZAMARRE?O SUáREZ
• University of Belgrade - Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering: Fedja Netjasov , Bojana Mirkovic and Doroteja Timotic Petkovic
• Lund University: Anthony Smoker
• EUROCONTROL: Tamara Pejovic
• ENAIRE: Patricia Ruiz Martino
• Zenabyte: Carlo Dambra , Irene Buselli , Luca Oneto

Special thanks to former colleagues who contributed to the FARO project: Miguel García Martínez , Javier García Moreno and Nnenna Ike, PhD .