Techniques for High Assurance in Submarine Systems

The embedded control and information systems deployed in the Virginia Class submarine provide a sophisticated set of functions that must deliver safe and dependable mission critical functions. When considering the application domain, safety and system certification activities can become a formidable task in each development spiral. As the system evolves and is maintained, the need to repeat the certification process represents a significant contributor to the life cycle cost structure. WWTG offers an innovative and practical approach for detailing how high confidence technologies can be implemented within a critical submarine embedded control system, including complex fly-by-wire systems. Our approach centers on the representation of system dependability, safety and certification aspects within a comprehensive system architecture model. This model and a supporting set of analysis tools enable system designers to make effective design trade-offs that lead to reduced overall recertification costs while maintaining the required dependability and safety properties across the complete system life cycle. These tools are equally applicable for the analysis of fielded systems that require increased reliability or availability.BENEFITS: Our approach contains many benefits when employed on complex high failure consequence systems that address system performance, dependability, safety and life cycle cost. The key benefit that our technology provides is reduced system certification costs while maintaining high levels of system 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.