Model-Based Dependability Analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - A Case Study

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a type of safety-critical system, which demand the verification of dependability properties in different levels of abstraction in order to achieve certification and to be released for operation. Existing model-based techniques have been successfully used in the industry, and recommended by safety standards in automotive and aerospace domains to support system design and dependability analysis. However, there is a lack of a context-aware and systematic approach to support the usage of model-based techniques to support dependability analysis in the UAV domain. This paper presents a systematic and context-aware model-based approach to support dependability analysis and automated generation of artefacts required for safety-certification of UAVs. The approach was applied in SLUGs UAV with the support of HiP-HOPS dependability analysis technique/tool. As a result, the application of the proposed approach enabled the automated generation of dependability artefacts, reducing the effort/costs, and number of errors in performing dependability analysis.