A System Engineering Method for Analysis and Simulation of Standard Operational Procedures

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) define flight deck operations by prescribing the sequence of actions for flight crew to complete each segment of the mission. Well-designed procedures allow the flight crew to perform the required sequence of actions in a feasible progression within the operationally allowable time window. Current practices for developing procedures rely on judgments of domain experts and are tested by experts in simulators. This approach is expensive, time consuming, and dependent on subjective assessments. This paper describes the application of a formal model that complements the work of domain experts by assessing the cueing and timing of SOPs’ interactions using a combination of sequence diagram and Monte Carlo simulations to support time-to-complete analysis. The method is demonstrated by a case-study comparing two alternative procedures for a four-engine jet aircraft.