Abstract
Abstract
As low-altitude unmanned aircraft operations involve more vehicles, operators, infrastructure nodes, and traffic-management services, identity, motion, and mission records must remain interpretable across organizational boundaries. Their meaning depends on origin, timing, responsible actors, and source dependencies. We propose a domain-specific low-altitude operational audit contract implemented through a provenance-aware evidence model. It distinguishes intended, observed, and claimed states and binds them to mission context, control authority, and source lineage. A versioned nine-component record preserves explicit missing, unavailable, and unresolved states, authority transitions, and historical gaps. We evaluated the contract through semantic-conformance and regression verification across 19 recorded runs covering eight predefined scenarios and complementary software-in-the-loop captures. All 475 applicable baseline audit queries matched their expected evidence states. Rather than proposing a generic provenance formalism, the contract provides an implementation-tested evidence-governance basis that can support future multi-actor UAS logistics and UTM/U-space studies.