Safety Assessment of Point Merge Operations in Terminal Airspace

An IEC 61508 viewpoint

Authors

  • Derek Fowler Independent Safety Consultant
  • Nicolas Fota EUROCONTROL

Keywords:

IEC 61508, Air Traffic Management, Safety Assessmsnt, SESAR, P-RNAV, Point Merge

Abstract

An article entitled “An IEC 61508 Viewpoint on System Safety in the Transport Sector”, in Volume 1, Issue 2, of the Safety-Critical Systems Club eJournal, proposed a way of thinking about the safety assessment of transportation systems that is based on the fundamental principles of international functional-safety standard IEC 61508.  Now, in this article, the example of Point Merge — a systemised method for sequencing arrival flows developed by the then EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre and first deployed in Oslo in 2011 — is used to outline how an IEC 61508 approach to safety assessment could be applied to the Air Traffic Management sector in general.

Point Merge Route Layout

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Published

2023-01-30