Hazards in advising autonomy: A structured approach seeking novelty in developing the requirements for an exemplar

Abstract

This paper describes the first phase of a research project to identify and initiate the development, or improvement, of tools that are relevant to identifying and managing hazards likely to arise with automatic advice (e.g. system health advice, plus others) within airborne autonomous systems. In this first phase a rigorous approach has been attempted in the development of the systems requirements in the recognition that at least three systems of interest are present in the system of systems space -the airborne systems' regulatory environment, the airborne systems of interest, and the proposed hazard identification and assessment toolbox itself. The approach presented here describes an effective treatment of a literature survey as a textually based requirements analysis process. The textual analysis and a phased Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process are described with a worked example, and placed into context of the (civil) airborne certification and regulatory environment.

Hazards in advising autonomy: incorporating hazard modelling with system dynamics into the aerospace safety assessment process for UAS

“…A proposal for a closed-loop safety assessment process, incorporating HAZOP styled upon STPA, system dynamics modelling, and Bayesian inference, is proposed as an approach to extend the PASA for a UAS/UAV; as shown in Figure 9. This arises from an earlier provisional requirements analysis and a discussion of bottom-up model building [5,6]. To date, a dynamical model incorporating representative behaviours has been created, with a selection of hazardous vignettes also identified and explored.…”

Hazards in advising autonomy: Developing requirements for a hazard modelling methodology incorporating system dynamics

“…Therefore, so as to aid understanding of the certification system requirements within the context of a larger systems engineering problem, a provisional model based design representation of the aircraft certification process has been constructed, and requirements thereof analyzed [4]. The resultant model serves as the reference point in the understanding of the process of assessing any safety related aircraft function -at least in outline.…”