Software certification of airborne cyber-physical systems under DO-178C
Stylianos Basagiannis · 2016
Airborne systems are considered to compose a highly complex network of interconnected Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Following the ARP-4754A development guidelines, a series of multidisciplinary engineers have to decompose system, hardware and software requirements in order to validate their correctness. System intrinsic complexity though, imposed by CPS(s), constitutes the certification of airborne systems a difficult, time-consuming and often expensive task. In the same line, requirements traceability, validation and verification is considered to be a crucial part of certification processes for both hardware (DO-254) and software (DO-178C) components. In this paper we review challenges and solutions for software certification under the DO-178C standard using formal verification in line with new CPS analysis evolution. We describe current model-based design methodologies followed today in the aerospace domain and comment on new approaches and techniques that could accelerate the software certification processes with respect to CPS(s) requirements.