Abstract
This paper is on the Failure Modes and Effects and Criticality Analysis and Fault Tree Analysis methodologies applied to the equipment and functional subsystems of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS). Such aerial vehicles have been used almost exclusively for military purposes until the first decade of the 2000s. The debate then was focused both on technical and regulatory issues and research activities. Thanks to this renewed interest on unmanned systems and thanks to relatively recent improvements in information science, telecommunication, electronics and material science a strong awareness on the potential extension of unmanned technologies to civil applications arose up. A variety of economic benefits has been recognized by the aviation community from the civil use of RPAS, but, due to the absence of the pilot on board both military and civilian RPAS have always been relegated to fly into segregated airspaces. Technical potentialities of RPAS will be fully exploited integrating them into controlled airspaces in a reliable and safe way. This paper shows an example of application of FMECA and FTA to RPAS and discuss the most critical issues related to the performed analyses as well as possible future developments of this work.
Highlights
Since the first decade of 2000s a new interest arose on civil Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS)
The reason is that Automatic Dependant Surveillance Broadcast’ (ADS-B) loss or degradation of performance can affect the safety of the RPAS reasonably enhancing the probability of occurrence of mid-air collisions between manned aircraft and RPAS or between RPAS if flying on the same route
According to [8], most failure modes are undetectable from the remote pilot; in the best cases visual or audible warning devices can be foreseen for his situational awareness
Summary
The RPAS model used for the analyses is shown in figure 1, figure 2 and figure 3. The FTA analysis has been performed focusing on RPAS functionalities associated to each RPAS subsystem listed in Table 1 identifying and considering possible combinations of events/faults. In this paper Automatic Surveillance Dependant – Broadcast (ADS-B) FMECA analysis and Detect and Avoid (DAA) functionality (under Flight Control subsystem) FTA analysis have been reported in Section 4 as examples of the performed work. Such topics have been preferred for the paper among the others included into unmanned systems for their crucial safety role in the incoming integration of RPAS into controlled airspace besides manned aircraft ([8], [9])
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