Automated Verification of State Machines in eVTOL Aircraft: A Lean Development Approach

The high development efforts in electrical vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft require automated testing and verification tools. This is especially true because many - often young - eVTOL companies have limited testing staff. Some eVTOLs can execute highly complex functions and require highly complex vehicle management functions called system automation. The system automation consists of many individual state machines. This paper presents a software tool that automatically verifies a state machine implementation based on pre-defined functional requirements. It runs the state machine under test as a black box and inputs all possible input combinations. Finally, an example of a simplified state machine is given for which the presented automatic testing and verification software tool was utilized in real life for a 700 kg eVTOL project. The presented tool significantly reduced the overall system automation testing efforts while reliably finding implementation errors.