U-space separation management service: concept definition and validation

Over the last decade, the unmanned aircraft industry has attracted a great deal of interest due to its potential and multitude of applications, especially in urban environments. This has led authorities and the general public to raise different issues and concerns, among which safety is the most prevalent. Safety is one of the pillars of BUBBLES, an Exploratory Research (ER) project funded by SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU) that aims to define a new concept of operations to provide separation management in U-space airspaces. The main contribution of BUBBLES is to provide guidelines for dealing with conflict management in tactical phase, i.e., the separation provision phase, in U-space airspaces. In the context of BUBBLES, this paper presents the concept of separation management service, which applies dynamic separation minima tailored to the traffic class, the operational environment, and the performance of the Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) system. This concept has been validated through test flights in a rural environment simulating operation in a U3 environment, including a basic Human Performance Assessment (HPA).