Platform of Formal Modeling and Analysis for Airborne Software Requirements

Abstract

Airborne software systems play very important roles in modern civil aircraft systems, and there are several safety standards, including DO-178B/C, etc., that are compulsory to be satisfied before airborne software can be certificated by the authority of government. According to the DO-178B/C, the consistency and integrity of airborne software requirements must be analyzed and verified in the early stage of software development. In this paper, we introduce a formal modeling and analysis tool platform (ART: Avionics Requirement Tools) for airborne software natural language requirements, and a case study of the requirements of the software subsystem of the Indication-Recording System (IRS) is provided. Firstly, we give the semantics of a formal Variable Relationship Model (VRM), the platform architecture, and toolchain of ART. Then a methodology of formal analysis of requirement consistency and integrity based on a multi-paradigm is given. After that, some details of the case study of IRS are shown including: how to make a preproccessing of original requirements and the automatic analysis process of the requirement model, such as the preprocessing and standardization of original requirement items, automatic generation of VRM models and multi-paradigm based formal analysis, etc. Lastly, some experiences of this case study are shown.