A Family-Based Approach to Safety Cases for Controlled Airspaces in Small Uncrewed Aerial Systems

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.