The Aviation System Monitoring and Modeling (ASMM) Project of NASA's Aviation Safety and Security Program is developing a set of automated tools to enable efficient, comprehensive, and accurate analyses of data from large, heterogeneous databases within the National Aviation System.

ASMM will provide decision makers with tools, such as APMS (Aviation Performance Measurement System), NAOMS (National Aviation Operational Monitoring Service) and PDARS (Performance Data Analysis and Reporting System) to improve safety by identifying and correcting predisposing conditions that could lead to incidents or accidents. Our goal is to enable proactive management of safety risk, rather than waiting until accidents happen to discover what conditions should be changed.

Although the task of analyzing flight data for the entire National Airspace System is fraught with practical and technical difficulties, the ASMM project has efficiently handled these issues by focusing on developing the technology rather than building the ultimate database, and using fully de-identified data with a small number of participants.

The APMS and PDARS aspects of ASMM develop tools allowing individual operators to draw useful information from the data they gather within their own organizations, providing an intramural perspective in the pursuit of aviation safety. The NAOMS element complements these efforts through a holistic extramural perspective of aviation system safety.