A Safety-Driven Architectural Framework for Fail-Operational Drone Swarms in Critical Missions

Abstract:The certification of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms for safety-critical operations requires verifiable design assurance. Airworthiness standards demand deterministic reliability, whereas multi-agent coordination algorithms execute non-deterministic models. This paper proposes a mixed-criticality architectural framework that applies SAE ARP4754B methods to swarm reconfiguration. First, a hardware-isolated Safety Monitor functions as a Run-Time Assurance (RTA) gateway, decoupling the flight-critical core from the non-deterministic Swarm Manager. Second, the monitor enforces formal safety contracts based on agent Health Vectors derived systematically from a Functional Hazard Assessment (FHA). Third, the framework propagates these Health Vectors to the collective planner to trigger fail-operational task reallocation, enabling intelligent swarm behaviors without compromising flight-critical isolation. Markov reliability modeling demonstrates that the $10^{-7}$ failures per flight hour Hazardous target is theoretically achievable for our SAIL IV scenario, provided the Safety Monitor meets $C_{monitor}>0.9991$, consistent with DAL B CMD/MON implementations.

10 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for presentation at the 45th AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), Orlando, FL, USA, 2026. \c{opyright} 2026 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses

Systems and Control (eess.SY); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.20906 [eess.SY]

(or arXiv:2608.20906v1 [eess.SY] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.20906 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)