Enabling Autonomy in Commercial Aviation: An Ontology and Framework for Automating Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)

Abstract

Autonomous air vehicles are rapidly gaining interest within the aviation industry with novel business cases such as urban air mobility, package delivery, and more. However, these increasingly autonomous systems come with increasingly numerous and complex inputs that software must handle. This limitless set of inputs must ensure that autonomous system decisions will translate to operations that are safe for the general public. This thesis contributes to knowledge by introducing an ontology and framework, with supporting analyses, to align individuals before beginning research and product development efforts in autonomous vehicles. This framework and the supporting ontology and analyses seek to provide a quantitative, repeatable method for describing the increase of operational uncertainty with the increase in automation for a UAS.