Technologies for Cost-Effective Mixed-Criticality Flight Control Systems

Future DoD systems, such as UAVs, will rely on greater functional integration and autonomy that create interactions among applications and resources that have mixed criticalities. WWTG’s innovations in this project will benefit the Air Force (and other DoD branches) by providing: 1) A tool-assisted design strategies for composing mixed critical system architectures based on Aspect Containment Regions (ACRs) mapped onto system partitions, 2) A middleware service that will assist and enforce the ACR mappings, 3) a means for non-invasive run-time diagnosis for detecting violations. A companion tool suite is used for analysis and certification using a model-based approach. In analyzing mixed critical architectures we utilize a component-based analysis approach centering on the representation of system security, safety, dependability and certification aspects within a comprehensive system architecture model. The process and tool can be used to reduce overall recertification costs while maintaining the required security, dependability, safety and real-time performance properties across the complete system life cycle. BENEFIT: Our approach contains many benefits when employed on complex high failure consequence systems that address system security, dependability, safety and life cycle cost. The key benefit that our technology provides is reduced system build/certification costs while maintaining high levels of system security, reliability and safety. By integrating system certification process sensitivities with system architectural models the cost drivers in the certification process are exposed and can be actively considered with other traditional design trade-offs. This leads to more cost effective initial designs and upgrades of existing systems. The integration of attributes for dependability and safety provide addition benefits; enabling early detection of reliability issues or potential safety violations, which in turn leads to deployed systems that are more robust and have lower cost due to elimination of expensive rework late in the development cycle. The benefits can be applied to any domain that relies on information flow and requires verification and certification of aspects for, security, dependability and safety. Foremost among these domains are DoD MILS/S, aircraft, ship control, C4I, grid computing, weapons systems and information security systems.