Safe Operation Monitoring for Specific Category Unmanned Aircraft

Future unmanned aircraft systems are allowed to incorporate operational aspects for flight approval due to the new EASA “specific” category. Incorporating operational aspects offer new possibilities for the verification and validation of complex functions used especially in highly automated vehicles. For these functions, verification and validation can focus on predefined operational aspects prior to flight. In-flight, limits of the operation are monitored to assure the correct working environment for these functions resulting in a safe operation. In this paper, we present the notion of safe operation monitoring and depict operational limits to be supervised. One prominent example for such an operational limit is geofencing. Geofencing prevents an unmanned aircraft from entering a forbidden airspace by using virtual fences. Specifically, in this paper, we present an algorithm and describe parameters for the buffer distance used for the geofence boundary values. The algorithm can be highly parallelized which is important when considering realistic geofences of future operations. Further, we highlight the use of a formal specification language and simulation results which support the verification and validation of geofencing, respectively. The chosen specification language is not limited to geofencing, other operational limits can be expressed and monitored in-flight to assure the safe operation.