Regulatory Frameworks and Development Standards for Civilian Unmanned Aircraft Systems: From Regulatory Safety Intent to Development Lifecycles

Journal article, 2026

The rapid growth of civilian unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for various applications, such as logistics, inspection and surveillance has enabled increasingly complex UAS operations in shared airspace and in close proximity to third parties. European regulations for civilian UAS provide a comprehensive framework for operational approval, based on operational rules, risk-based approval processes, and airspace management concepts. While regulatory frameworks and current international standards provide detailed guidance for operational authorization for UAS, they do not prescribe how UAS should be developed and verified at a system and software level to support safety assurance in a structured and traceable manner. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a method for extracting system-level and software-level safety requirements from regulatory artifacts. The method interprets regulatory safety intent–expressed through operational constraints, mitigation measures, and robustness expectations–and translates it into development-relevant safety requirements under explicit operational assumptions. Building on these requirements, the paper introduces a software-centered system lifecycle for UAS development. The proposed lifecycle integrates regulatory safety intent, risk-proportionate assurance, and staged verification. Finally, through a cross-domain analysis, the paper positions the proposed approach relative to established practices from the automotive and the avionics domains, aiming to identify transferable and necessary adaptations for the development of unmanned aircraft systems.