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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PACAS (Participatory Architectural Change Management in ATM Systems)

Teaser

Summary

-What is the problem/issue being addressed?
ATM systems are complex systems-of-systems that are managed via a layered architectural model. Understanding all possible consequences of a design decision in ATM systems is a challenge due to the complexity of these systems and the existence of tight interdependencies within the ATM architecture.
- Why is it important for society?
A careful consideration of possible changes together with their implications on the entire ATM system is crucial to support decision-making, while making sure that the ATM system does not suffer from any issues with respect to functionality, safety, security, performance, or other desired characteristics of a well-functioning ATM system.
-What are the overall objectives?
PACAS is about supporting change management in ATM systems from an architectural point of view, relying on the active participation of ATM domain stakeholders through gamification. The project constructs a platform that facilitates understanding, modelling and the analysis of changes in the ATM system at different layers of abstraction. To accommodate the expertise of the various domain stakeholders PACAS provides a multi-view, model-based approach, in order to represent and analyse different objectives, specifically economical, organizational, security, and safety concerns. The PACAC process relies on automated reasoning techniques to find optimal solutions (trade-off) among the various objectives.

Work performed

\"At the end of the third period, the PACAS consortium has achieved these objectives:
- Released the second stable version of the PACAS platform, which is the result of several iterations, starting from gap analysis and interactions with ATM domain stakeholders (through two workshops, WS#0 and WS#1) performed in the first period, internal discussions, and the recent evaluation with AB members at the second validation workshop (WS#2).
- Established the PACAS scenario together with AB members at WS#1. After the feedback and interactions with the POs, the scenario has been reshaped to focus on particular decision points, so that the scope is not too vast.
- Redefined the participatory change management process, after the feedback received at WS#2, representing the status of the change management process and its outcomes, as well as the roles involved, in order to help users understand the status and take actions in case of deviations or focus the effort in specific tasks.
- Defined gamification elements, including the avatar and incentives, which have undergone evaluation too.
- Released the modelling notations for the four expert views, with the security and safety ones being quite stable from the first release, and the organizational and economic views undergoing some customizations being more domain-dependant.
- Released and evaluated with AB members at WS#2 the automated reasoning techniques for impact propagation in the form of a web service that is integrated in the platform. Currently, we are developing the multi-objective trade-off analysis.
- Several dissemination and communication activities, in particular the active participation to SID with posters and tutorials on the PACAS concept.
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Final results

PACAS aims to provide support for change management in ATM systems by effectively collecting and representing expert knowledge, capturing possible changes and their corresponding impacts on the ATM system, and finally reasoning on these representations to find the optimal solution based on stakeholder-defined criteria. Thus, the participatory process and platform build on the following innovation pillars (in line with the overall PACAS R&D activities):
â— Multi-view participatory design process to support change management for European ATM Systems architectural design. The process represents a new way for stakeholders to collaborate in an open-ended, engaging (through gamification) yet rigorous process that, by aligning the expertsâ€™ perspectives, should result in a more harmonized evolution of the EATMA.
â— Innovative multi-view, multi-level and multi-stakeholder concepts for modelling ATM systems to capture strategic objectives of the involved domain stakeholders, emphasizing the sociotechnical nature of ATM systems. We have identified the state of art modelling techniques for each PACAS perspective, tailoring a separate view per expertise (economics, organisation, security and safety).
â— New reasoning techniques that allow analysing strategic objectives from multiple perspectives and the interdependencies between the strategic and functional (operational, service, system) levels to preserve their alignment. We have identified the state of art reasoning techniques through an in-depth gap analysis, defined impact propagation techniques per view, and started work on multi-objective trade-off analysis.
The impact of the work conducted so far remains that of the adoption of the PACAS participatory framework, which is expected to strongly support the achievement of the following goals described in the ATM Architecture SESAR Exploratory Research Topic (ER-10-2015):
â— Better understand and model how architectural and design choices influence the ATM system and its various behaviours,
â— Propose innovative approaches, derived also from other industrial domains, such as participatory design,
â— Model changes and support in a structured way change management and decision-making.
As far as socio-economic and societal impacts are concerned, the proposed Participatory Design Approach will have a great impact in motivating and involving ATM stakeholders at different levels and also in better communicating and sharing information and objectives.