Decision Making on Certification of Flight Readiness. Process and Tools

Decision making on certification of flight readiness (CoFR) is a crucial process of mission support management, including risk identification, assessment and management. This paper proposes a proactive CoFR approach (which could be common on the International Space Station Program (ISSP)) and describes a pilot project implementation on the program to deploy a formalized CoFR model and corresponding decision making process. This paper introduces a concept for formalizing the decision-making on certification of flight readiness. While decision-making techniques were developed to make the best decisions possible with the information available, they are now well known and have theoretical foundations. As well, they are supported by proven tools that make them a valuable methodology for organizations to apply the methodology on space programs as a formal procedure. The techniques help to map out the likely consequences of decisions, work out the importance of individual factors, and choose the best course of action to take. Learning from each CoFR decision-making, regardless of their ultimate outcome, reduces the risk of missing valuable information from CoFR exercises and ultimately from space programs. The incomprehension of the reasons behind successes in addition to root causes behind failures may be another associated risk to be reduced. Decision-making actions are integrated into the CoFR life cycle at key points and are essential to the CoFR process. Facilitated by a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) tool, significantly less decision making effort is required on the part of participants during the CoFR exercise. A practical result of the work described in this paper is a web-based workflow package prototype with inherent features such as access management, e-mail alerts, status monitoring, role/task (re-)assignments, on-line validation, real-time follow-up, escalation, delegation, audit trail, to name a few. A customized off-the-shelf platform serves as the prototyp- e for a collaborative environment supporting the CoFR process.