EVTOL Flight Control System Safety: An Example of Application Using MBSA 2023-01-7105

Electrical Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles hold great promises for revolutionizing urban mobility. Their emergences as a transformative transportation technology has led multiple Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) competing for market share, with important variety of technical solutions, all necessitating to demonstrate the compliance to safety requirements and regulations. Model Based Safety Analysis (MBSA), newly introduced in ARP4761A and based on compositional and modular representation of failure propagation paths within one system, provides a unique opportunity to increase efficiency by maximizing the possible reuse of safety analyses elements across multiple architectures (“product line” philosophy). Generic library of safety models for elements of variant architectures can be efficiently constructed using MBSA techniques that can then support safety analyses on variant architectures or architectures trade-off. This approach can facilitate a safety process that enable customized safety solutions without complete re-engineering of the safety analyses for each architecture.

The purpose of this paper is to present and illustrate one work performed on the definition of a safe Flight Control System for eVTOL, leveraging the capacity of a MBSA based approach to ensure high level of agility and rapid responsiveness. The first sections will present the need, the MBSA approach and a general modelling process that can be used to employ MBSA methodology. Then, an example of eVTOL Flight Control System architecture and safety analyses will be detailed to picture how MBSA, coupled with a generic component library, can provide an easily adaptable safety solution. Finally, we discuss some possible next steps and future work identified in order to certify a solution thanks to this method.