A Method for the Automated Generation of Requirements and Traceability for a Distributed Avionics Platform

The development of distributed, fault-tolerant and safety-critical integrated avionics systems from the first concepts and drafts to the finalization of the certification process is complex and therefore a resource-intensive task. A significant share of the resulting expenditure of time, costs and labor can be allocated to the system management. Against this background, the aim of previous and ongoing research at the Institute of Aircraft Systems at the University of Stuttgart is to significantly reduce this development and qualification effort with a platform based approach and an automation process.

The Flexible Avionics Platform is characterized by a clear separation of the system functions (laws) from the system management, i.e., the Platform Instance Management (plama). The plama abstracts the system's complexity, distribution, and redundancy and therefore provides the hosted laws with a simplex minded view for their remaining pure controller functionality, which simplifies their development and qualification. A plama is based on generic software components which are composed and specialized through an automated configuration process. This and further automation steps are realized with the AAA process which consists of the three subprocesses: The Automated design and parameter instantiation (Axx) for the plama; The Automated document generation (xAx), of all plama requirements documents including their traceability and version data; And the Automated generation of verification artifacts (xxA), such as test cases and test scripts.

The contribution of this work is a method for the second of the three subprocesses and its implementation in a tool suite. The xAx tool suite generates the system and high-level software requirements documents for the Platform Signal Communication (placom-sig) which is the plama's most extensive software subpart. The resulting requirements documents are comparable to manually created ones, which in turn enables manual validation.