Model-based Approach to Validation and Verification of Flight Critical Software

Abstract

The time and cost associated with the development and certification of flight-critical software bled air vehicles. This upward trend is expected to continue as future vehicles will be increasingly autonomous and intelligent. Affordable, efficient processes and tools are needed to control development costs and schedule, as well as to ensure the safety of these vehicles. This paper presents the results of a U. S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) sponsored project on the development of validation and verification (V&V) technologies for flightcritical software. The purpose of the project is to improve the affordability and safety for software V&V, specifically, for adaptive and/or mixed-criticality software.

A content analysis-based approach to explore simulation verification and identify its current challenges

“…The changes to the defining characteristics of verification in each decade reflect technological and methodological advancements within the discipline [50] and occur as a result of technology advances creating new or solving existing problems [14,15,49,76]. Verification costs increase as a result of increasing system autonomy, complexity, and abilities to assess their own status [77]. These characteristics reflect challenges pertaining to parallel execution, large amounts of simulated data [15,78], building and running models in the cloud [38,39,60,79,80], and tracing the occurrences of errors to their sources [61,81,82].…”

“…For example, verifying human interactions involves checking increasing orders of magnitudes of socially and spatially oriented interactions [30,34] and increasing quantities of agents and options for modeling decision making [138]. Verifying safety-critical systems deals with identifying issues pertaining to multiple internal layers for self-monitoring, safety checks for maintaining flight paths and altitude [77,139], and collision avoidance [140]. Epstein [141] develops a mathematical model incorporating, among other factors, social components in order to explore the emergent dynamics of network structure.…”

“…As an alternative, it may be more appropriate to develop techniques based on whether a test is intended to be applied to the simulation code, provide indicators during runtime, facilitate input-output analysis, or conduct exhaustive, formal analysis. Runtime approaches may provide better short-term options for gaining acceptance by the M&S community by providing informal, real-time support for revealing potential errors as they occur [77,158], such as through the use of animations and other visual representations [24,62,72,156] as well as through audial feedback [94]. Emerging runtime approaches help to pinpoint the locations of errors through sound cues [159], spatial plots, and heat maps [128].…”

Certification of software for real-time safety-critical systems: state of the art

“…Several recent papers discuss such issues as the impact of model-based development on certification [70], model-based testing of code generators [71], verification of model processing tools (syntax checking tools, simulation tools, analysis tools, and synthesis/code generation tools) [72], and the application of model-based approach to the validation and verification of flight critical software for the UAV's [73]. Denney and Trac [74] discuss an interesting approach to automatic code generation, by using a tool called AutoCert, which "supports certification by automatically verifying that the generated code is free of different safety violations, by constructing an independently verifiable certificate, and by explaining its analysis in a textual form suitable for code reviews."…”

An Environment for Indoor Testing and Diagnosis of Drones using Co-simulation

“…Several groups of researchers around the world are seeking for new strategies to test or to evaluate drones, in this context, various works can be cited: [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15] and [16]. However, the integration of the drone with Ptolemy via HLA is not yet present in the literature.…”