System Architectures and Its Development Efforts Based on Different Risk Classifications

This work develops a set of high-level system architectures for an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) for the low altitude transport of one ton payload within the Automated Low Altitude Air Delivery (ALAADy) project. These architectures are further analyzed regarding their development effort. Based on the Specific Operation Risk Assessment (SORA) as Acceptable Means of Compliance (AMC) for the Specific Category of the new EU regulation for UAS, requirements are derived and processed into the architectures. A reference architecture for a certified system is developed for comparison as well. Overall, four major architectures are found. Within SORA, regarding the use case of a large cargo drone, only flights over sparsely populated areas are possible. Consequently, for flights over populated areas a certified system is needed. Requirements in SORA are based on the intrinsic risk of an operation. The risk can be modified by applying mitigations. Therefore, different levels of requirements have to be used for the same mission depending on the mitigations used. Within the analysis of the development effort a nondimensional relative effort factor is found. As a result an ALAADy mission within SORA with limited mitigations and high-risk requirements has little difference to a certified system. Furthermore, a gap is found between two adjacent requirement levels. It is shown that the development effort ranges from the least demanding to the most demanding architecture in half an order of magnitude.