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At least 127 records · Page 7

Application of the Tool for Turbine Engine Closed-loop Transient Analysis (TTECTrA) for Dynamic Systems Analysis

Systems analysis involves steady-state simulations of combined components to evaluate the steady-state performance, weight, and cost of a system; dynamic considerations are not included until later in the design process. The Dynamic Systems Analysis task, under NASAs Fixed Wing project, is developing the capability for assessing dynamic issues at earlier stages during systems analysis. To provide this capability the Tool for Turbine Engine Closed-loop Transient Analysis (TTECTrA) has been developed to design a single flight condition controller (defined as altitude and Mach number) and, ultimately, provide an estimate of the closed-loop performance of the engine model. This tool has been integrated with the Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation 40,000(CMAPSS40k) engine model to demonstrate the additional information TTECTrA makes available for dynamic systems analysis. This dynamic data can be used to evaluate the trade-off between performance and safety, which could not be done with steady-state systems analysis data. TTECTrA has been designed to integrate with any turbine engine model that is compatible with the MATLABSimulink (The MathWorks, Inc.) environment.

systems analysis↗

Acquisition, representation and rule generation for procedural knowledge

Current research into the design and continuing development of a system for the acquisition of procedural knowledge, its representation in useful forms, and proposed methods for automated C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS) rule generation is discussed. The Task Analysis and Rule Generation Tool (TARGET) is intended to permit experts, individually or collectively, to visually describe and refine procedural tasks. The system is designed to represent the acquired knowledge in the form of graphical objects with the capacity for generating production rules in CLIPS. The generated rules can then be integrated into applications such as NASA's Intelligent Computer Aided Training (ICAT) architecture. Also described are proposed methods for use in translating the graphical and intermediate knowledge representations into CLIPS rules.

Ortiz, Chris↗

2007 Research and Engineering Annual Report

Selected research and technology activities at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center are summarized. These following activities exemplify the Center's varied and productive research efforts: Developing a Requirements Development Guide for an Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System; Digital Terrain Data Compression and Rendering for Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance Systems; Nonlinear Flutter/Limit Cycle Oscillations Prediction Tool; Nonlinear System Identification Using Orthonormal Bases: Application to Aeroelastic/Aeroservoelastic Systems; Critical Aerodynamic Flow Feature Indicators: Towards Application with the Aerostructures Test Wing; Multidisciplinary Design, Analysis, and Optimization Tool Development Using a Genetic Algorithm; Structural Model Tuning Capability in an Object-Oriented Multidisciplinary Design, Analysis, and Optimization Tool; Extension of Ko Straight-Beam Displacement Theory to the Deformed Shape Predictions of Curved Structures; F-15B with Phoenix Missile and Pylon Assembly--Drag Force Estimation; Mass Property Testing of Phoenix Missile Hypersonic Testbed Hardware; ARMD Hypersonics Project Materials and Structures: Testing of Scramjet Thermal Protection System Concepts; High-Temperature Modal Survey of the Ruddervator Subcomponent Test Article; ARMD Hypersonics Project Materials and Structures: C/SiC Ruddervator Subcomponent Test and Analysis Task; Ground Vibration Testing and Model Correlation of the Phoenix Missile Hypersonic Testbed; Phoenix Missile Hypersonic Testbed: Performance Design and Analysis; Crew Exploration Vehicle Launch Abort System-Pad Abort-1 (PA-1) Flight Test; Testing the Orion (Crew Exploration Vehicle) Launch Abort System-Ascent Abort-1 (AA-1) Flight Test; SOFIA Flight-Test Flutter Prediction Methodology; SOFIA Closed-Door Aerodynamic Analyses; SOFIA Handling Qualities Evaluation for Closed-Door Operations; C-17 Support of IRAC Engine Model Development; Current Capabilities and Future Upgrade Plans of the C-17 Data Rack; Intelligent Data Mining Capabilities as Applied to Integrated Vehicle Health Management; STARS Flight Demonstration No. 2 IP Data Formatter; Space-Based Telemetry and Range Safety (STARS) Flight Demonstration No. 2 Range User Flight Test Results; Aerodynamic Effects of the Quiet Spike(tm) on an F-15B Aircraft; F-15 Intelligent Flight Controls-Increased Destabilization Failure; F-15 Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control (IRAC) Improved Adaptive Controller; Aeroelastic Analysis of the Ikhana/Fire Pod System; Ikhana: Western States Fire Missions Utilizing the Ames Research Center Fire Sensor; Ikhana: Fiber-Optic Wing Shape Sensors; Ikhana: ARTS III; SOFIA Closed-Door Flutter Envelope Flight Testing; F-15B Quiet Spike(TM) Aeroservoelastic Flight Test Data Analysis; and UAVSAR Platform Precision Autopilot Flight Results.

Stoliker, Patrick↗

Function Allocation between Automation and Human Pilot for Airborne Separation Assurance

Maintaining safe separation between aircraft is a key determinant of the airspace capacity to handle air transportation. With the advent of satellite-based surveillance, aircraft equipped with the needed technologies are now capable of maintaining awareness of their location in the airspace and sharing it with their surrounding traffic. As a result, concepts and cockpit automation are emerging to enable delegating the responsibility of maintaining safe separation from traffic to the pilot; thus increasing the airspace capacity by alleviating the limitation of the current non-scalable centralized ground-based system. In this paper, an analysis of allocating separation assurance functions to the human pilot and cockpit automation is presented to support the design of these concepts and technologies. A task analysis was conducted with the help of Petri nets to identify the main separation assurance functions and their interactions. Each function was characterized by three behavior levels that may be needed to perform the task: skill, rule and knowledge based levels. Then recommendations are made for allocating each function to an automation scale based on their behavior level characterization and with the help of Subject matter experts.

Idris, Husni↗

Human Research Program Space Human Factors Engineering (SHFE) Standing Review Panel (SRP)

The Space Human Factors Engineering (SHFE) Standing Review Panel (SRP) evaluated 22 gaps and 39 tasks in the three risk areas assigned to the SHFE Project. The area where tasks were best designed to close the gaps and the fewest gaps were left out was the Risk of Reduced Safety and Efficiency dire to Inadequate Design of Vehicle, Environment, Tools or Equipment. The areas where there were more issues with gaps and tasks, including poor or inadequate fit of tasks to gaps and missing gaps, were Risk of Errors due to Poor Task Design and Risk of Error due to Inadequate Information. One risk, the Risk of Errors due to Inappropriate Levels of Trust in Automation, should be added. If astronauts trust automation too much in areas where it should not be trusted, but rather tempered with human judgment and decision making, they will incur errors. Conversely, if they do not trust automation when it should be trusted, as in cases where it can sense aspects of the environment such as radiation levels or distances in space, they will also incur errors. This will be a larger risk when astronauts are less able to rely on human mission control experts and are out of touch, far away, and on their own. The SRP also identified 11 new gaps and five new tasks. Although the SRP had an extremely large quantity of reading material prior to and during the meeting, we still did not feel we had an overview of the activities and tasks the astronauts would be performing in exploration missions. Without a detailed task analysis and taxonomy of activities the humans would be engaged in, we felt it was impossible to know whether the gaps and tasks were really sufficient to insure human safety, performance, and comfort in the exploration missions. The SRP had difficulty evaluating many of the gaps and tasks that were not as quantitative as those related to concrete physical danger such as excessive noise and vibration. Often the research tasks for cognitive risks that accompany poor task or information design addressed only part, but not all, of the gaps they were programmed to fill. In fact the tasks outlined will not close the gap but only scratch the surface in many cases. In other cases, the gap was written too broadly, and really should be restated in a more constrained way that can be addressed by a well-organized and complementary set of tasks. In many cases, the research results should be turned into guidelines for design. However, it was not clear whether the researchers or another group would construct and deliver these guidelines.

Wichansky, Anna↗

SAGE III/ISS Rapid Data Analysis Through Dashboarding with Jupyter Notebooks

Spaceborne remote sensing observations of Earth’s atmosphere produce significant quantities of data over the life of each mission. In the case of the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III on the International Space Station (SAGE III/ISS) nearly four years of vertical profiles of atmospheric ozone, water vapor, and nitrogen dioxide concentrations as well as aerosol extinction coefficients have been released. The dichotomy of the desire for both long-term trends in the atmospheric state alongside the assessment of short-term impacts of major disruptive events such as volcanic eruptions and pyrocumulus injections requires agile tools to handle these cases in near real-time as new data are produced. The analysis landscape is further complicated by the desire to compare results between the numerous contemporary observations available for a given dataset. The SAGE III/ISS team has developed a suite of tools leveraging modern web-based frameworks allowing members to interact with a dashboard-style interface to load the data record, assess new profiles as they are generated and in ensemble, compare between species, and additionally add in measurements observed by other platforms as necessary. Leveraging a commonly packaged data format of NetCDF alongside the Python Jupyter Notebook framework, the data can be served to interested parties from an analysis server while still runnable on personal systems if required. This presentation illustrates the ecosystem developed by the SAGE III/ISS team, the applicability to measurements made by any limb-observing platform, and the benefit to transforming routine analyses into readily accessible dynamic plots. Frameworks currently exist at larger scales with projects such as GIOVANNI, and this illustration seeks to show that similar frameworks are accessible and possible within the local research environment while simultaneously unloading human processing cycles for more specialized analysis tasks.

Dashboarding↗

Situation Awareness Information Requirements for Commercial Airline Pilots

Situation awareness is presented as a fundamental requirement for good airmanship, forming the basis for pilot decision making and performance. To develop a better understanding of the role of situation awareness in flying, an analysis was performed to determine the specific situation awareness information requirements for commercial aircraft pilots. This was conducted as a goal-directed task analysis in which pilots' major goals, subgoals, decisions, and associated situation awareness information requirements were delineated based on elicitation from experienced commercial airline pilots. A determination of the major situation awareness information requirements for visual and instrument flight was developed from this analysis, providing a foundation for future system development which seeks to enhance pilot situation awareness and provide a basis for the development of situation awareness measures for commercial flight.

Endsley, Mica R.↗

Development of flight experiment task requirements. Volume 2: Technical Report. Part 2: Appendix H: Tasks-skills data series

The data sheets presented contain the results of the task analysis portion of the study to identify skill requirements of space shuttle crew personnel. A comprehensive data base is provided of crew functions, operating environments, task dependencies, and task-skills applicable to a representative cross section of earth orbital research experiments.

Hatterick, G. R.↗

Analysis and interpretation of arterial sounds using a small clinical computer system

A small mobile bed-side computer system is described that is capable of performing phonoangiographic analyses as well as many other common data analysis tasks in a hospital. The clinical application of phonoangiography is found to be greatly facilitated by the computer-provided availability of data acquisition and analysis capabilities.

Dewey, C. F., Jr.↗

Processing CCD Images to Detect Transits of Earth-Sized Planets: Maximizing Sensitivity While Achieving Reasonable Downlink Requirements

We have performed end-to-end laboratory and numerical simulations to demonstrate the capability of differential photometry under realistic operating conditions to detect transits of Earth-sized planets orbiting solar-like stars. Data acquisition and processing were conducted using the same methods planned for the proposed Kepler Mission. These included performing aperture photometry on large-format CCD images of an artificial star fields obtained without a shutter at a readout rate of 1 megapixel/sec, detecting and removing cosmic rays from individual exposures and making the necessary corrections for nonlinearity and shutterless operation in the absence of darks. We will discuss the image processing tasks performed `on-board' the simulated spacecraft, which yielded raw photometry and ancillary data used to monitor and correct for systematic effects, and the data processing and analysis tasks conducted to obtain lightcurves from the raw data and characterize the detectability of transits. The laboratory results are discussed along with the results of a numerical simulation carried out in parallel with the laboratory simulation. These two simulations demonstrate that a system-level differential photometric precision of 10-5 on five- hour intervals can be achieved under realistic conditions.

Earth-size planets↗

Human Performance Modeling and Simulation for Launch Team Applications

This paper describes ongoing research into modeling and simulation of humans for launch team analysis, training, and evaluation. The initial research is sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA)'s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) and NASA's Exploration Program and is focused on current and future launch team operations at Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The paper begins with a description of existing KSC launch team environments and procedures. It then describes the goals of new Simulation and Analysis of Launch Teams (SALT) research. The majority of this paper describes products from the SALT team's initial proof-of-concept effort. These products include a nominal case task analysis and a discrete event model and simulation of launch team performance during the final phase of a shuttle countdown; and a first proof-of-concept training demonstration of launch team communications in which the computer plays most roles, and the trainee plays a role of the trainee's choice. This paper then describes possible next steps for the research team and provides conclusions. This research is expected to have significant value to NASA's Exploration Program.

Peaden, Cary J.↗

ATDRS payload technology research and development

Four technology development tasks were chosen to reduce (or at least better understand) the technology risks associated with proposed approaches to Advanced Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (ATDRS). The four tasks relate to a Tri-Band Antenna feed system, a Digital Beamforming System for the S Band Multiple Access System (SMA), an SMA Phased Array Antenna, and a Configuration Thermal/Mechanical Analysis task. The objective, approach, and status of each are discussed.

Anzic, G.↗

Program For Systematic Documentation Of Tasks

Task Analysis Report Generation Tool (TARGET) computer program is graphical-interface software tool used to capture procedural knowledge and translate knowledge into hierarchical report. Designed to help programmer document expert's task, enabling programmer to build expert-system computer program that helps others perform task. Flexibility key element of design and of knowledge-acquisition session. Easy to use and tailored to accommodate users ranging from novice to experienced builder of expert systems. Written in C language.

Ortiz, Christopher John↗

Preliminary Results Obtained in Integrated Safety Analysis of NASA Aviation Safety Program Technologies

This is a listing of recent unclassified RTO technical publications processed by the NASA Center for AeroSpace Information from January 1, 2001 through March 31, 2001 available on the NASA Aeronautics and Space Database. Contents include 1) Cognitive Task Analysis; 2) RTO Educational Notes; 3) The Capability of Virtual Reality to Meet Military Requirements; 4) Aging Engines, Avionics, Subsystems and Helicopters; 5) RTO Meeting Proceedings; 6) RTO Technical Reports; 7) Low Grazing Angle Clutter...; 8) Verification and Validation Data for Computational Unsteady Aerodynamics; 9) Space Observation Technology; 10) The Human Factor in System Reliability...; 11) Flight Control Design...; 12) Commercial Off-the-Shelf Products in Defense Applications.

Source record↗

ATDRS payload technology R & D

Four technology development tasks were chosen to reduce (or at least better understand) the technology risks associated with proposed approaches to Advanced Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (ATDRS). The four tasks relate to a Tri-Band Antenna feed system, a Digital Beamforming System for the S Band Multiple-Access System (SMA), an SMA Phased Array Antenna, and a Configuration Thermal/Mechanical Analysis task. The objective, approach, and status of each are discussed.

Anzic, G.↗

Technology assessment of future intercity passenger transportation systems. Volume 7: Study recommendations

Research and analysis tasks to alleviate negative impacts, to augment positive impacts, or to better understand the impacts produced by the potential introduction of the alternate transportation technologies are identified. The project team's recommendations on research and analysis efforts which have resulted from the technology assessment are provided. Many of the recommendations apply to the future supply of intercity passenger transportation services, categorized by mode. Other recommendations pertain to broad issues in intercity transportation--e.g., finance, regulation, traveler values--that will affect all modes.

Source record↗

Enhancements to the Design Manager's Aide for Intelligent Decomposition (DeMAID)

This paper discusses the addition of two new enhancements to the program Design Manager's Aide for Intelligent Decomposition (DeMAID). DeMAID is a knowledge-based tool used to aid a design manager in understanding the interactions among the tasks of a complex design problem. This is done by ordering the tasks to minimize feedback, determining the participating subsystems, and displaying them in an easily understood format. The two new enhancements include (1) rules for ordering a complex assembly process and (2) rules for determining which analysis tasks must be re-executed to compute the output of one task based on a change in input to that or another task.

Rogers, James L.↗

Enhancements to the Design Manager's Aide for Intelligent Decomposition (DeMaid)

This paper discusses the addition of two new enhancements to the program Design Manager's Aide for Intelligent Decomposition (DeMAID). DeMAID is a knowledge-based tool used to aid a design manager in understanding the interactions among the tasks of a complex design problem. This is done by ordering the tasks to minimize feedback, determining the participating subsystems, and displaying them in an easily understood format. The two new enhancements include (1) rules for ordering a complex assembly process and (2) rules for determining which analysis tasks must be re-executed to compute the output of one task based on a change in input to that or another task.

Rogers, James L.↗