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.