Software Certification of Airborne Cyber-Physical Systems under DO-178C Stylianos Basagiannis United Technologies Research Centre 4th floor Penrose Wharf Cork, Ireland Email: basagis@utrc.utc.com Abstract—Airborne systems are considered to compose a highly complex network of interconnected Cyber-Physical Sys- tems (CPS). Following the ARP-4754A development guidelines, a series of multidisciplinary engineers have to decompose system, hardware and software requirements in order to validate their correctness. System intrinsic complexity though, imposed by CPS(s), constitutes the certification of airborne systems a difficult, time-consuming and often expensive task. In the same line, re- quirements traceability, validation and verification is considered to be a crucial part of certification processes for both hardware (DO-254) and software (DO-178C) components. In this paper we review challenges and solutions for software certification under the DO-178C standard using formal verification in line with new CPS analysis evolution. We describe current model-based design methodologies followed today in the aerospace domain and comment on new approaches and techniques that could accelerate the software certification processes with respect to CPS(s) requirements. I. I NTRODUCTION Embedded systems’ evolution has been acknowledged the past decade from the majority of engineering domains. Recent advances on central processing units, memory and communi- cation buses have uplifted the need for the embedded software to align with those enhancements [1]. In parallel, aerospace companies are being forced to adapt product line engineering processes, with new tools to validate and certify their products, as long as new hardware platforms are being utilized by them. It is an obvious solution toward this end, that model-based design and particularly formal verification could provide the means to successfully and rapidly create certification credit for the new products, with respect to avionics regulations. But are current state-of-the practice tools mature enough to address the complexity of those prototypes especially in the context of highly-integrated aerospace cyber-physical systems? The provision of integrated modeling, simulation, optimiza- tion and verification tools to effectively support all stages of aircraft design remains a critical challenge in the aerospace in- dustry [10]. While several breakthroughs have been achieved in this area, costly design iterations are still a common necessity to successfully design, develop, integrate, validate and verify the components and subsystems of modern aircraft. High level system integration that is characteristic of new 978-1-5090-3079-8/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE aircraft designs is dramatically increasing the complexity of both design and verification in particular for fault detection for the under-development software (as seen in Fig. 1). Moreover, the cyber-physical interactions between structural, electrical, thermal, ICT and hydraulic components with aerospace de- vices have resulted into analysis tasks being hard to execute for system safety and stability. Fig. 1. Aircraft Software Complexity Example This overview paper aims to describe design and verification advances towards the establishment of model-based certifica- tion principles, in order to support compositional ”design-for- certification” methods of safety-critical aerospace systems. We initially argue that it is of paramount importance that validated frameworks and work-flows should be in place and tested for their applicability, in verifying conflict-free execution of software on the allocated hardware. Such a cyber-physical setting will require co-modeling tools and techniques to col- laborate with mature formal verification approaches, in order for automatically generate proofs that will be adequate for product certification. Focus will be given around the software certification under DO-178C objectives as described in [2] and how formal methods with co-simulation could rapidly accelerate certification processes.