In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the development and usage of flying drones due to their diverse capabilities worldwide. Public and private sectors will actively use drone technology in the logistics of goods and transporting passengers in the future. There are concerns regarding privacy and noise exposure in and around the rural and urban environment with the rapid expansion. Further, drone noise could affect human health. European Union has defined a service-orientated architecture to provide air traffic management for drones, called U-space. However, it lacks a noise modelling service (NMS). This paper proposes a conceptual framework for such a noise modelling service for drones with a use case scenario and verification method. The framework is conceptualized based on noise modelling from the aviation sector. The NMS can be used to model the noise to understand the accepted drone noise levels in different scenarios and take measures needed to reduce the noise impact on the community.
Keywords: U-space architecture; UAVs; Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management; accepted noise levels; drones; noise model.