Urban Air Mobility involves a completely new type of aircraft — Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) systems — with electric propulsion, integrated engine and flight controls, a new operational concept and less pilot involvement. To face these challenges, there is a strong need for efficient development processes and tools to meet safety and airworthiness objectives.

Ansys offers a model-based approach for driving the analysis, development and certification of mission and flight systems as well as software. These models can be validated against mission requirements through a Digital Mission Engineering approach with high-fidelity simulation.

A comprehensive digital demonstrator will showcase the streamlined development process of two VTOL  aircraft, including critical mission and flight software: one manned VTOL leader, followed by another unmanned VTOL. Safety analyses are conducted in an integrated way on the whole VTOL system to refine safety requirements and achieve a robust, fail-  operational system and software architecture. The focus will be on a specific scenario involving a system failure which could result in catastrophe. The correct system reconfiguration is validated with a mission scenario simulation, integrating the real flight software.