Technologies for Cost-Effective Mixed-Criticality Flight Control Systems

Airworthiness assessments of software-intensive based systems in aviation cannot be limited to verification and testing of the end product, i.e. computer code, since other factors can have an important effect on safety and integrity. Current methods and tools have limitations that do not adequately address the issues affecting the growth in complexity and cost of system development and certification. This project will continue to advance Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) methods and tools that enable virtual integration and verification in a system architecture context for software-intensive aviation platforms. A major focus of the effort will be on using software code artifacts to generate architecture models and perform resulting system analysis. The techniques for assessment will include verification of system safety and security properties. The generated results can be organized into V&V arguments, and evidence chains. Establishing traceability of these artifacts provides values throughout the life cycle. Defects can be removed during the design stage, legacy components can be characterized and tightly integrated into architecture models, and continuous system verification can be performed by checking the correctness and integrity of the evidence chain, from system design to code artifacts.