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 the safety margins. To address this need, EDAptive Computing, Inc. (ECI) team has developed an integrated Validation and Verification (V&V) method for safety assurance commencing at design-time, used during development (implementation) and persisting (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, thereby enabling run-time error detection. Our solution is consistent with EDAptiveT 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, thereby enabling computer interpretation and analysis of these requirements. Further, the resulting system specifications from our method are used to accelerate implementation and verification of the system and ensure consistency between the design and its implementation.