The R&D 100 Awards are presented annually by R&D Magazine to honor the world's 100 most important scientific and technical innovations. The PNNL award is shared with co-developers NASA Ames Research Center, Battelle, Flight Safety Consultants, ProWorks Corporation and Safe Flight. PNNL has now won 67 R&D 100 Awards since the contest's inception in 1969.
The Morning Report: Advanced Proactive Safety and System Monitoring Tool is a computational tool used to analyze large datasets of aviation information collected by onboard aircraft instruments. Continuous analysis of flight data can be used by aviation safety experts and airline policy makers to determine subtle but potentially serious safety issues.
Every day, the Morning Report collects gigabytes of the day's flight information and presents data the next morning in tabular or graphical reports. The reports allow safety inspectors to rapidly pinpoint anomalies, share information with other decision makers and possibly prevent accidents. While the technology utilizes complex mathematical and statistical algorithms it is easy to operate via a simple desk-top application.
PNNL researchers say the Morning Report's software and algorithms can be extended to other domain applications to monitor massive amounts of data and to identify typical patterns and atypical events, enabling domain experts to monitor complex systems.
"This award demonstrates that DOE scientists and researchers are hard at work developing the technologies of the future," said Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman. "In the past, breakthroughs like this have played an important role in both our economic and national security."
The Morning Report's inventors and the other winning innovators will be recognized in October at R&D Magazine's 43rd annual banquet held in Chicago, where the magazine is based.
PNNL (www.pnl.gov) is a DOE Office of Science laboratory that solves complex problems in energy, national security, the environment and life sciences by advancing the understanding of physics, chemistry, biology and computation. PNNL employs more than 4,000 staff, has a $650 million annual budget, and has been managed by Ohio-based Battelle since the lab's inception in 1965.