Architectural design of a Safe Mission Manager for Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Abstract

Civil Aviation Authorities are elaborating a new regulatory framework for the safe operation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). Current proposals are based on the analysis of the specific risks of the operation as well as on the definition of some risk mitigation measures. In order to achieve the target level of safety, we propose increasing the level of automation by providing the onboard system with Automated Contingency Management functions. The aim of the resulting Safe Mission Manager System is to autonomously adapt to contingency events while still achieving mission objectives through the degradation of mission performance. In this paper, we discuss some of the architectural issues in designing this system. The resulting architecture makes a conceptual differentiation between event monitoring, decision-making on a policy for dealing with contingencies and the execution of the corresponding policy. We also discuss how to allocate the different Safe Mission Manager components to a partitioned, Integrated Modular Avionics architecture. Finally, determinism and predictability are key aspects in contingency management due to their overall impact on safety. For this reason, we model and verify the correctness of a contingency management policy using formal methods.

Revue Systématique de la Littérature sur le Soutien à la Sécurité des Opérations de Drones

“…La préservation de l'intégrité de l'aéronef constitue 16.16% des articles. Les thèmes sont principalement les systèmes embarqués dont les systèmes de commandes en vol [27], notamment la détection de défaillances [17,21,22,57,89,90,96], la gestion des contingences [110], la conception de systèmes résilients [111,122] et les aides pour l'atterrissage [26,52,86,98,112,116].…”

Reconfigurable Mission Plans for RPAS

“…This architecture combines the main ideas of the behavior-based paradigm [18,19] and the three-tier architecture defined by NASA [20]. The collaboration with this group has provided some ideas on how to introduce contingency management into the proposed architecture [21,22]. Other software architectures for mission planning have been proposed in the work cited above [11].…”

“…In previous work, the authors of this paper presented a contingency management scheme for RPAS [21,22]. It was developed on the basis of avoiding as much as possible any hardcoding of policies: it should provide the right mechanisms to allow for different contingency options.…”

“…In previous works, the authors presented the software architecture of a Mission Management System for RPAS [21,22]. The proposed architecture extends the two-layer scheme of a conventional airliner to provide higher levels of automation and to enable automated contingency handling.…”

Resilient architecture to dynamically manage unmanned aerial vehicle networks under attack

“…UAVs face numerous challenges to navigate autonomously in a viable and safe way (ALWATEER; LOKE; ZUCHOWICZ, 2019;HOPPE et al, 2019). According to Usach et al (2018), only Remotely Piloted Autonomous Systems (RPAS) can be integrated with manned aircraft in unsegregated airspace and aerodromes. To fully integrate UAVs into today's airspace, it is necessary to work on autonomous monitoring and management technologies that are resistant to attacks, so that they provide the necessary security for the aircraft and the environment.…”