Autonomous Operations of Complex Enviromental Systems

U.S. agencies are accomplishing their missions to protect lives and property using complex systems comprised of hardware, software, networks, and human-machine interfaces. Automation of these systems is increasingly required to transfer information between enterprise system components at the speed of need. NOAA environmental systems generate data at rates of >20TB per day that are processed through their value chain and delivered to provide decision support to people serving in roles from air traffic controllers to emergency managers to meet national security objectives.

State-of-health and state-of-performance are currently conducted on select systems within the Environmental Enterprise Value Chain using a range of tools, techniques, processes, and people. There is value in a holistic, enterprise-wide approach to verify performance of systems along the value chain, as well as impacts of degraded performance at any point in the system of systems to the overall mission of protecting lives and property.

This paper will discuss our work on applying over 5 decades of experience in national security space and innovative tools and techniques to provide real-time insight into environmental information system operations across their enterprise. Our Aerospace project team is evolving tools and techniques to conduct independent assessment of real-time operations of complex systems that comprise the NOAA Environmental Data Intelligence Value Chain.

Advancements in real-time data analytics are applied to mission assurance in three initial task areas:

• Operational Impact Assessment – Innovate tools and techniques for real-time diagnostics of mission performance vulnerabilities through the value chain using data analytics to assess anomalies and trends for proactive enterprise system operations management and corrective action to prevent disruptive degradation or outages impacting NOAA mission.

• Real-Time Information Assurance – Innovate tools and techniques using Big Data, data analytics and machine learning to provide autonomous response and recovery, as well as notifications to operators, based on out-of-threshold measurements at points through the value chain.

• Long-Term Enterprise Performance – Innovate solutions to offset NOAA observation systems degradation over time by assessing potential impacts on NOAA enterprise integrity to meet mission of providing warnings, watches and other environmental information.