Challenges on the Application of Formal Methods for Validation and Verification in Aerospace Systems Engineering
- 14:00 24th October 2018LTB
The complexity of modern aircraft development is rising constantly pushed by the growth of thetransportation market, the continuous technology improvements, the rising of new technologies, thedevelopment of more challenging regulations and the ever increasing competition. The high costinvestments involved with the development of an aircraft and its constituent systems leads airframers andsystem suppliers to take critical design decisions early, with a potentially high risk on the development andoperational costs of the aircraft. On the other hand, the increasing complexity makes the costs and risksconnected with the verification and testing of aircraft systems and their integration constantly rising.These considerations are pushing the aerospace industry towards growing deployment of model-basedmethods to anticipate design problems closer in time to when the design decisions are taken, to reduce therisk of turn-backs and migrate towards a virtual testing driven development process to gradually achieveright-the-first-time test rig campaigns and safety-of-flight.In this evolving landscape, promising model-based technologies beyond simulation are emerging to supportthis view, including property falsification, automatic test generation and coverage and formal verificationtechnologies. Nonetheless, there still remain compelling challenges to overcome to render thesetechnologies widely applicable across the aerospace industry. In this paper, we present such challenges andposition them in context of the development process of aerospace systems and relevant aerospaceengineering standards.