Generic Operational Simulation of Civil Unmanned Air Vehicle Operations

Started: 1st May 2011
Investigators: Hans Fangohr, James Scanlan

Civil missions intended to be used.

Current aerospace design processes largely neglect operational aspects during the early design phase. This can lead to sub-optimal products that are struggling in their operational environment. This research creats a tool for designers of civil Unmanned-Air-Vehicles (UAVs) that allows better understanding of a design in various mission scenarios. The aim is to combine operational outputs with value calculations to show comprehensible, comparable and tracable benchmarks of specific designs conducting specified missions. Designers will be able early on to test design ideas in their intended operational environments and get feedback on product performance. The simulation model will include a wide array of civil UAV missions, combined internally by a unifying ontology that can map any one mission into any other. Included scenarios include:

Land management
Broadcasting
Traffic monitoring
Pipe line monitoring
Mapping
Patrolling
Search-and-Rescue
Fire detection
and more

An initial project covered the operational simulation of Search-and-Rescue missions (see http://cmg.soton.ac.uk/research/projects/operational-simulation-of-the-solent-search-and-rescue-environment/). It helped to design a real UAV designed by the DECODE-team (http://www.soton.ac.uk/~decode/) revealing unexpected results regarding design decisions.

Computational Modelling Group

Generic Operational Simulation of Civil Unmanned Air Vehicle Operations

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