TY - GEN
T1 - Handling Complex System Architectures with a DO-178C/DO-331 Process-Oriented Build Tool
AU - Panchal, Purav
AU - Myschik, Stephan
AU - Dmitriev, Konstantin
AU - Bhardwaj, Pranav
AU - Holzapfel, Florian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Software development in safety-critical systems is invariably accompanied with extensive documentations, strict methodologies and verification activities. While software vendors will provide the necessary software tools and tool qualification artifacts, the details on how each tool component is interlinked in development process are usually a part of the intellectual property of large aerospace companies and not publicly accessible. This poses a market entry barrier for startups and small/medium enterprises, whose numbers have grown, especially in the areas of electrical aviation as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) systems.The process-oriented build tool presented in this paper is aiming to address this problem by providing an exemplary toolchain setup for a DO-331 compliant software development process. Based on MathWorks' MATLAB and Simulink products, the tool provides a development environment with predefined model templates, block libraries, and configuration settings as well as jobs for executing process-relevant tasks, like automatic code generation or static model analysis. By doing so, the tool ensures consistency of model artifacts created by developers across teams and also compatibility with downstream tools used for verification and validation on model and code level. Artifacts from each process step are stored within the tool so that full bidirectional traceability can be ensured.While the tool has been used in the development of flight control applications in the past, its capabilities are currently improved based on lessons learned from these projects and furthermore, extended to new use-cases.This paper will discuss two tool improvements: handling of dependencies of distributed software modules and tool artifact ownership, which are made to handle complex software-development project consisting of multiple software components developed by a distributed team. To demonstrate the improvements, the development of a distributed battery control software used in a smart-battery concept for an electrically powered aircraft is presented. This software is comprised of multiple software modules representing a battery master controller as well as multiple slave controllers.
AB - Software development in safety-critical systems is invariably accompanied with extensive documentations, strict methodologies and verification activities. While software vendors will provide the necessary software tools and tool qualification artifacts, the details on how each tool component is interlinked in development process are usually a part of the intellectual property of large aerospace companies and not publicly accessible. This poses a market entry barrier for startups and small/medium enterprises, whose numbers have grown, especially in the areas of electrical aviation as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) systems.The process-oriented build tool presented in this paper is aiming to address this problem by providing an exemplary toolchain setup for a DO-331 compliant software development process. Based on MathWorks' MATLAB and Simulink products, the tool provides a development environment with predefined model templates, block libraries, and configuration settings as well as jobs for executing process-relevant tasks, like automatic code generation or static model analysis. By doing so, the tool ensures consistency of model artifacts created by developers across teams and also compatibility with downstream tools used for verification and validation on model and code level. Artifacts from each process step are stored within the tool so that full bidirectional traceability can be ensured.While the tool has been used in the development of flight control applications in the past, its capabilities are currently improved based on lessons learned from these projects and furthermore, extended to new use-cases.This paper will discuss two tool improvements: handling of dependencies of distributed software modules and tool artifact ownership, which are made to handle complex software-development project consisting of multiple software components developed by a distributed team. To demonstrate the improvements, the development of a distributed battery control software used in a smart-battery concept for an electrically powered aircraft is presented. This software is comprised of multiple software modules representing a battery master controller as well as multiple slave controllers.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85141937654&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/DASC55683.2022.9925871
DO - 10.1109/DASC55683.2022.9925871
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85141937654
T3 - AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference - Proceedings
BT - 2022 IEEE/AIAA 41st Digital Avionics Systems Conference, DASC 2022 - Proceedings
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 41st IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference, DASC 2022
Y2 - 18 September 2022 through 22 September 2022
ER -
