Drone missions in urban areas or at long range offer new opportunities for drone operators but require approval from the authorities due to the potential risks. Obtaining authorization is complex and time-consuming since operators must produce and often iterate on a concept of operation and risk analysis documents to accommodate the authorities' expectations. Our goal is to support the drone mission planning process to make it more efficient so that more and safer operations can be designed and authorized. In this paper, we describe our work designing and assessing interactive representations of operational parameters on maps to enhance thinking and accelerate the process from early concept definition to mission execution. We first collaborated with an operator during a longitudinal study that enabled us to refine and explore our concepts and prototype with real-world use cases. We then collected the feedback from authorities to evaluate the ability of our prototype to match the needs and requirements beyond our first study. Our results indicate that visually representing the concept of operations makes its description more accurate and easier to understand. We also found that exploring the impact of the operational parameters on safety actively supports risk identification and the formulation of adequate mitigation. We believe that our work can inspire the design of future safety support systems and may also contribute to supporting the collaborative process between operators and authorities needed for drone operations in the Specific category.

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Dans cet article, nous nous intéressons au soutien à la sécurité des opérations de drones. Il s'agit d'un enjeu primordial pour les exploitants qui doivent se conformer au cadre légal. Nous présentons tout d'abord les systèmes de drones et la réglementation européenne. Ensuite nous décrivons une revue systématique de la littérature sur cette thématique. L'identification des approches principales en résulte : "Voir & Éviter", Interactions Humain-Machine et Facteurs Humains (IHM/FH), intégrité de l'aéronef, analyses de sécurité, planification de trajectoires, géorepérage, cyber-sécurité et gestion du trafic de drones. Nous analysons plus en détail les contributions liées à l'IHM en identifiant les tâches utilisateurs, les recommandations pour la conception d'interactions améliorant la sécurité des opérations de drones et les perspectives de recherche. Enfin, nous discutons des aspects peu couverts dans les articles examinés.

The use of civilian drones is a growing market offering services such as delivery, surveillance or rescue. The operationalization of these uses is complex and presents a level of risk that must be controlled through safety analysis processes and authorization requests before any flight. In order to instrument these processes with usable interactive systems, we conducted interviews with drone operators, safety study coaches and regulators. We found that despite the use of many tools and methods, files often have to be modified several times following feedback from regulators. We describe the work processes and the interaction between actors during the missions preparation. The preparation include the definition of a concept of operation, the assessment of operational risks and obtaining an authorization to operate from authorities. For each of these steps, we offer recommendations for designing new interactive systems able to support safety. RÉSUMÉL'usage des drones civils est un marché en expansion proposant des services tels que la livraison, la surveillance ou le sauvetage. L'opérationnalisation de ces usages est complexe et présente un niveau de risque à maîtriser par des processus d'analyse de sécurité et de demandes d'autorisation avant tout vol. Afin d'instrumenter ces processus avec des systèmes interactifs utilisables, nous avons mené des entretiens auprès d'opérateurs de drones, d'accompagnateurs pour les études de sécurité et de régulateurs. Malgré l'utilisation de nombreux outils et méthodes, les dossiers doivent souvent être modifiés plusieurs fois suite aux retours des régulateurs. Nous décrivons les processus de travail et les interactions entre acteurs ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.