Architectural Considerations Towards Automated Contingency Management for Unmanned Aircraft

Abstract

Contingency management is a key aspect in safe operation of manned aviation. Motivated by previous work, we continue to explore how an Automated Contingency Management could be integrated into unmanned aircraft. We first discuss architectural considerations that can be integrate from the start into an unmanned aircraft system design and its derived software components. Therefore, the first part of this paper focuses on contingency management as an integral part of a system and software architecture. Due to the overall impact on functionality correctness, determinism and predictability are key aspects of contingency management. Furthermore, compliance to existing regulations in manned aviation is important for a consistent air traffic management. As a result, our approach supports high quality requirements for these contingency procedures by formalization and their validation. One way to support the formalization process is to clearly represent these requirements in a structured and pseudo formal way, which is the second focus of this paper.