Automated Requirements and Traceability Generation for a Distributed Avionics Platform

The development and qualification of distributed and highly safety-critical avionics systems implicate high efforts and risks. The resulting costs usually limit implementations like fly-by-wire systems to the military or commercial airliner domains. The aim of previous and ongoing research at the Institute of Aircraft Systems at University of Stuttgart is the reduction of these costs and therefore open up their benefits, inter alia, to general aviation, remotely piloted or unmanned aircraft. An approach for an efficient development is the application of a platform based development which supports the reuse of software and hardware components. The Flexible Platform adopts this approach. It is accompanied by a tool suite which automates the design and parameter instantiation, documentation generation and the generation of verification artifacts for a platform instance. This paper presents the approach for the requirement document generation compliant to ARP4754A and DO-178C. It is based on configurable requirement classes. In addition, relation classes build the base for the generation of a bidirectional traceability. The implemented system and high-level software requirement classes for the platform signal communication as well as their instantiation with the tool suite were validated with a representative platform instance model for a fly-by-wire system.