Automated Test Artifact Generation for a Safety-Critical Integrated Avionics Platform

Contemporary and future aircraft concepts face the increasing demand to perform more and complex mission scenarios. This entails a growing complexity within the corresponding aircraft systems, typically in terms of multitude of intricated system functions and safety assurance arising from mandatory, regulatory requirements.

Development and qualification of such complex and safety-critical systems poses a challenge linked with high efforts, risks, and hence cost, limiting the use at this point of time to commercial air transport or the military sector, while simultaneously aggravating the deployment in cost-sensitive domains like rotorcraft or general aviation aircraft.

The Institute of Aircraft Systems (ILS) at the University of Stuttgart in its long-term research focus on the technology of the flexible platform tries to overcome this situation by focusing on two key aspects. These are a clear separation between the cybernetic system function and the system management and an automated generation of the system management via a tool suite.

Baseline of the flexible platform technology is a platform-based approach consisting of a library of generic hardware and software components. Instances of this platform have been demonstrated in various laboratory and in-field demonstrators from a wide array of domains. Furthermore, this technology is embedded within the AAA-Process, which consists of the following complexes:

Axx – Automated Design and Parameter Instantiation,

xAx – Automated Documentation Generation,

xxA – Automated Generation of Verification Artifacts.

Subject of this thesis is the third automation complex, xxA - Automated Generation of Verification Artifacts and, mainly, the automated generation of testing artifacts for platform instances established by the flexible platform technology. Target is the generation of all testing artifacts at system and software level for the signal communication layer of the platform management directly from requirements.