Architecture-Driven Assurance for Safety-Critical Avionic Systems

As the growth in complexity of avionic systems continues, development costs and schedules have correspondingly increased dramatically. Systems engineering tools and methods have not sufficiently adapted to the demands of today’s complex systems and as a result avionic systems typically field late, over budget, and often with reduced capabilities. The status quo for systems and software engineering tools, methods and processes is no longer affordable. Architecture-Driven Assurance is model-based systems engineering (MBSE) development approach for constructing reliable and secure systems using engineering models. The objective of the architecture-driven assurance methodology is to ensure that cyber-resilient, functionally correct, verifiably safe components can be rapidly developed, integrated and verified. The approach integrates compositional reasoning into the engineering workflow utilizing system models and formalized descriptions of system behaviors. The models are translated into a form that can be interpreted by powerful formal methods based general-purpose analysis engines. Rockwell Collins has created an integrated development environment that supports the architecture-driven assurance concepts integrated into a systems engineering workflow.