Verification Tools / Techniques for Airborne Systems

Abstract

Most software errors are relatively harmless, albeit annoying, such as when a word processor crashes. However, errors in the failure of an aircraft’s flight control software, which could be catastrophic. Software systems deployed in safety-critical applications in avionics must satisfy rigorous development and verification standards. There are two different objectives for this project. First objective is to make Automated OCA Tool. In avionics, One of the most widely used standards is DO-178B. The object code verification is requirement of the DO-178B standard. As for any software, code is developed using languages like C, C++, or other. All the verification process is done on C code. But actually the code which runs on the target hardware is object code, which normally no one tests. Specific considerations with respect to compilers include that Object code that is not directly traceable to source code must be detected and verified with adequate coverage. For that OCA(Object code analysis) is done. Previously, OCA was done manually. But there are many challenges involved in manual OCA. The non-trivial amount of code needed to do take much time, effort and cost. Therefore, Automated OCA tool need to be developed. Automated OCA tool is built for PowerPC e500 Architecture which is used in airborne systems. It verifies that the code which is going to run on hardware (i.e. object code) is correct. Second Objective is Driver Verification for FAT32 File System on Linux kernel using Black Box Testing. A file system is the organization method of data on a hard disk volume. One of the most popular file systems used today is FAT32 (File Allocation Table). It needs to be tested that every file system operation works well, every combination of file system operations works as expected. Also that, there are no race conditions, deadlocks and crashes of file system code. For testing, requirements need to be captured from the FAT32 specifications and errors taken from Linux error codes. Test cases and test procedures will be written for the same. Test Procedures will verify that there is no other way to corrupt the file system’s data or crash the kernel by any combination of set of file system operations.