System Elements Required to Guarantee the Reliability, Availability and Integrity of Decision Making Information in a Complex Airborne Autonomous System by Karthik Ramalingam A Doctoral Thesis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Engineering Doctorate (EngD) of Loughborough University (2016) © by Karthik Ramalingam (2016) 3 Abstract Current air traffic management systems are centred on piloted aircraft, in which all the main decisions are made by humans. In the world of autonomous vehicles, there will be a driving need for decisions to be made by the system rather than by humans due to the benefits of more automation such as reducing the likelihood of human error, handling more air traffic in national airspace safely, providing prior warnings of potential conflicts etc. The system will have to decide on courses of action that will have highly safety critical consequences. One way to ensure these decisions are robust is to guarantee that the information being used for the decision is valid and of very high integrity. To meet regulatory requirements there will still need to be some form of human involvement, or back up, and the interface between computer and human will be very important. This doctorate will examine the issues associated with guaranteeing that information on which decisions will be made is valid and of very high integrity. The issues that will be addressed in the research are understand and examine the current architecture of the Air Traffic Management System (ATM) and its evolution to enable integration of UAS into the national airspace system in a phased- approach. Investigate UAS Sense and Avoid, a key UAS integration challenge, in order to determine the best place for decision-making processing (i.e. on board or remotely) from a technical and economical perspective. And finally, to develop a Ground-Based Sense and Avoid simulation architecture in order to investigate the impact of different configurations of GBSAA information display system on the decision-making capability of human operator Acknowledgement Firstly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my academic supervisor Professor Roy S. Kalawsky for his full support and patience during this Engineering Doctorate journey. His input and knowledge has been invaluable to my work. I would also like to thank my Industrial supervisor, Dave Lunn, for his input and support while I was based at Thales undertaking the research as a research engineer. Further, I would like to express my gratitude to all the staff at Thales Air Traffic Management (UK) who had accommodated me and providing their support during my time there. Special thanks to all the members of the software development team for their time and willingness to share their knowledge and experience with me. They also provided a great degree of information and a wealth of understanding that has contributed greatly to the research. I would also like to acknowledge the role of Thales UK for providing funding and supporting this research. Finally, I would like to thank my family, my mother Mrs. Uma, my father Dr. Ramalingam and my sister Dr. Bhuvaneshwari, for their moral support and encouragement throughout the process without which I would not have been able to complete the thesis. 2 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction .............................................................................................. 13 1.1 Rationale: The Need for Autonomy ......................................................................... 13 1.2 Autonomous Systems ................................................................................................ 14 1.3 Motivation for the study of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) ........................... 21 1.3.1 The Wider motivation ............................................................................................. 23 1.4 Thesis Structure .......................................................................................................... 26 1.4.1 Part I – Introduction and Background ............................................................... 26 1.4.2 Part II – UAS Integration in ATM: A System of Systems Architecture Analysis .......................................................................................................................... 26 1.4.3 Part III – UAS Sense and Avoid ......................................................................... 27 1.4.4 Part IV – Conclusions ............................................................................................ 29 1.5 Aim and Objectives .................................................................................................... 30 1.6 Why Unmanned Aircraft? .......................................................................................... 32 1.6.1 Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Overview ................................................ 33 1.6.2 Historical Perspective of Unmanned Aircraft .................................................. 36 1.6.3 UAS Types and Classifications ........................................................................... 38 1.6.4 UAS Applications .................................................................................................... 44 1.6.5 UAS Market Overview ........................................................................................... 46 1.6.6 Current Regulatory and Operational mechanism of UAS ........................... 52 1.7 Historical context of introduction of new technology into Aviation .................... 60 1.8 Positioning the Study ................................................................................................. 62 1.8.1 Factors influencing the research approach ..................................................... 62 1.8.2 Scope ......................................................................................................................... 63 1.9 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 65 Chapter 2: System-of-Systems Overview ................................................................. 67 2.1 Introduction to System-of-Systems ......................................................................... 67 2.2 System-of-Systems (SoS) Analysis ........................................................................ 76 3 2.2.1 Architecture Design Process ............................................................................... 77 2.2.2 Architecture Design Principles ............................................................................ 80 2.2.3 SoS Architecture Design ....................................................................................... 81 2.2.4 Architecture Frameworks ...................................................................................... 84 2.2.5 Modelling Language ............................................................................................... 86 2.3 Methodology to Architect and Analyse SoS .......................................................... 87 2.4 Air Traffic Management (ATM) as SoS .................................................................. 89 2.5 Scope ............................................................................................................................ 91 2.6 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 92 Chapter 3: SoS Analysis of ATM and integration of UAS in ATM Using Architecture Patterns ................................................................................................................ 93 3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 93 3.2 Architecture Patterns ................................................................................................. 93 3.3 Architecture Patterns Mining .................................................................................... 95 3.4 Verification and Validation of Architecture Patterns ............................................. 98 3.5 Air Traffic Management (ATM) Architecture Patterns ......................................... 99 3.5.1 Air Traffic Control Organisational Structure .................................................... 99 3.5.2 Airspace Classification Structure ...................................................................... 104 3.5.3 Air Traffic Surveillance ........................................................................................ 107 3.5.4 Air Traffic Communication .................................................................................. 117 3.5.5 Air Traffic Navigation ............................................................................................ 120 3.5.6 Air Traffic Weather ................................................................................................ 126 3.5.7 Future Air Traffic Management Structure ...................................................... 131 3.6 Summary .................................................................................................................... 133 Chapter 4: Integration of UAS in National Airspace System – A Complex SoS problem .............................................................................................................. 134 4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 134 4.2 Wicked