Technology for Affordable Validation and Verification (V&V) Software Design Processes and Safe Flight-Critical Software

There is an urgent need to reduce costs and risks associated with the development of flight critical software, while maintaining or improving safety margins. To address this need, the EDAptive Computing, Inc. (ECI) team has developed an integrated Validation and Verification (V&V) safety assurance method that commences during the design phase, is used during the development and implementation phases and persists (as error detection) through run-time operations. Our “SpecSafe” approach exploits formal, mathematically sound V&V techniques rather than manually intensive testing, and ad hoc or partial testing and verification methods. Our proposed V&V approach is based upon forming assertions using formal specifications and a higher-order logic theorem prover at design-time and inserting the assertions in program code, enabling run-time error detection. Our solution is consistent with EDAptive® Systems Engineering methodology and tool suite which provides a framework for the proposed solution. This methodology is based upon the premise that system requirements can be captured unambiguously in a computer-sensible manner, enabling computer interpretation and analysis of these requirements. Furthermore, our method produces system specifications that accelerate implementation and verification of the system and ensures consistency between the design and its implementation.