Identifying benefit mechanisms for nextgen technologies and concepts

The national airspace system was decomposed using an abstraction-decomposition hierarchy to identify a complete list of general system functions. Those system functions were then modeled using statechart notation, where the system is modeled as having goal states and failure states. The system then ideally moves to its goal states and stays out of its failure states; agents in the system identify and control states through the application of control. Each state is associated with specific values of a particular expression. Using this method, benefit mechanisms can then be comprehensively identified as acting on the underlying variability of those expressions, or of the uncertainty with respect to how well agents can detect the true values of these expressions.