Development of system architectures on the basis of SORA in the Specific Category and qualitative estimation of the implementation efforts

Abstract

This Work develops a set of high-level system architectures for an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) for the low altitude transport of a 1 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 [1] (SORA) as Acceptable Means of Compliance (AMC) for the specific category of the new European Union (EU) regulation for UAS, requirements are derived and processed into the architectures. An 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 necessary. Requirements in SORA are based on the risk which can be modified by mitigations. Therefore, different levels of requirements have to be used for the same mission depending on used mitigations. Within the analysis of the development effort a nondimensional relative effort factor is found. As a result, an ALAADy mission within SORA with less mitigations and sophisticated requirements has little difference to a certified system. Furthermore there is a gap found between two adjacent requirement levels. The development effort ranges from the least demanding to the most demanding architecture in half an order of magnitude.