Assessment of the impact of U-space faulty conditions on drone conflict rate

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained notable im- portance in civil airspace. To ensure their safe operation, U-space services are being defined. In this paper, we argue that the target level of safety of UAS can be threatened by faults, abnormal conditions, and security attacks. In this paper, we propose a fault-injection-based approach to build a framework to allow safety assessment of UAS under these conditions. We created a simulation-based setup to mimic a realistic scenario to study the impact of these conditions on UAS conflict metrics and surveillance performance metrics. Results show a correlation between the faults (impairments) introduced and the degradation of some performance metrics indicating the quality of the measured trajectory by the U-space. These metrics can be used by the UAV conflict management service to ensure UAS safe operation.