Evidence-based Certification Analysis and Planning in Acquisition

Aviation programs are designed to last decades and endure many system upgrades. One area that is poorly understood is the impact of aircraft certification. In particular, the intersection of military mission requirements with civil certification standards needs to be reconciled in order to understand the true impact on system development cost and schedule. Evidence-based Certification Analysis and Planning (ECAP) aims to provide analysts with a better understanding of the impact of cyber and aviation certification changes based on evidence from past programs. The Phase I effort for ECAP focused on decomposing requirements pertaining to Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast (ADS-B) transmission with regards to military missions. Specifically, we aligned certification requirements to evidence-based assurance cases using data from the C-130J program office. ECAP is able to automate the identification of requirements relevant to a natural language query as well as the evidence supporting verification of those requirements. During Phase II of ECAP, we plan to expand the data sources used to align requirements evidence-based assurance cases by incorporating structured datasets with historical or simulated data to make estimates about the cost of certification changes. MBSE systems lack cost information that needs to be exposed as part of the analysis process,