Case study: Ultra Datel safety-critical avionics upgrade using COTS
I recently had the privilege of working with one of our partners, LDRA, and one of our customers, Ultra Datel, on writing a case study of their experiences of a mid-life upgrade of an existing avionics system.
What caught my attention was the fact that the existing system was uncertified, and the upgrade involved migrating the existing system to a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and undertaking DO-178B Level B safety certification.
As a result, the project faced a number of development challenges because the pre-existing software and device drivers were not developed with safety certification in mind, and the code needed to be re-engineered and modified to meet safety certification requirements.
In the case study, we discuss the following development challenges and how they were overcome using the LDRA Tool Suite during the development of the safety-critical VxWorks application running on a GE Intelligent Platforms ruggedised PowerPC platform:
- Porting to the VxWorks DO-178B safety-critical subset
- Reduction of high cyclomatic complexity
- Programming language subset compliance
- Code coverage to meet DO-178B Level B objectives
The case study has now been published on the Wind River website on the Aerospace & Defence customers page (and the PDF file can be accessed directly here).
Paul Parkinson is a Principal Systems Architect with Wind River in the UK, working with Aerospace, Defence and Security customers across EMEA. Paul's professional interests include Information Security (InfoSec), Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) and Intelligence Surveillance Target Acquisition Reconnaissance (ISTAR) systems. 
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Excellent chassis
Posted by: david rigg | January 06, 2010 at 08:34 AM
from GE :)
Posted by: david rigg | January 06, 2010 at 08:40 AM