February 29, 2008 - Putney Awarded "Best Paper" at SSE&RM Symposium
Putney Awarded "Best Paper"
at SSE&RM Symposium
Los Angeles, CA – February 29, 2008 -- Valador Principal Scientist Blake Putney will receive the Best Paper Award at the 7th Annual Space Systems Engineering & Risk Management Symposium held in Los Angeles, CA. The paper, co-authored with Michael Bay and Mitchell Davis of the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, describes an “Iterative, Risk-Driven Design Approach for CEV Avionicsâ€.
The paper details the design approach developed by Valador and the NESC, which was implemented to analyze the tasks that comprised the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) Smart Buyer Program. One of the tasks, and the one of focus in the paper, involved an iterative, risk informed, build up design approach to decide where to apply mass resources to balance safety, performance, and affordability for CEV Avionics. The buildup approach started from a simple single string architecture to assure the solution design constraints were satisfied, then considered operational alternatives as well as the addition of backup systems and redundancy to eliminate risks. The fundamental objective of the build up approach was to find the safest, most reliable and affordable system design by applying mass, power and other resources where they provide the greatest benefit for safety and mission success.
The symposium was held at the Montura Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. Mr. Putney has over 30 years of experience in risk analysis technology and has made major contributions to the development of modern computerized techniques for risk assessment. He is an expert in developing relevant, elegant, and transparent risk models for complex systems, and aiding his customers in extracting useful insights that make a difference to their programs. In his current role, he is combining his management experience with PRA expertise to develop and apply new risk assessment technologies to integrate performance, cost and risk models to support NASA’s Constellation Program. Putney works for Valador in their Palo Alto, CA office.
