Reliability Engineering & System Safety

• For commercial aviation three Third Party Risk (TPR) indicators are well developed. • Currently only one is in use for TPR of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations. • The other two comply with TPR regulation of hazardous installations and airports. • The paper integrates all three for TPR assessment of commercial UAS operations. • This integrated approach is demonstrated to a UAS based parcel delivery service. Commercial aviation distinguishes three indicators for third party risk (TPR): i) Expected number of ground fatalities per aircraft flight hour; ii) Individual risk; and iii) Societal risk. The latter two indicators stem from TPR posed to population by operation of hazardous installations. Literature on TPR of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations have focused on the development of the first TPR indicator. However the expected increase of commercial UAS operations requires an improved understanding of third party risk (TPR). To support such improvement, this paper extends the existing TPR model for UAS operations with societal and individual risk indicators. The extension is developed both at modelling level and at assessment level. Subsequently the extended approach is applied to a hypothetical UAS based parcel delivery service in the city of Delft. The results obtained for the novel UAS TPR indicators show that this aligns commercial UAS operations with land use policies and standing TPR regulation for airports and hazardous facilities.

Third party risk modelling of Unmanned Aircraft System operations, with application to parcel delivery service