A qualification effort assessment framework for development processes of safety-critical system functions

This paper proposes an evaluation framework for quantifying the impact on the qualification effort using the Selective Middleware approach for safety-critical avionics functions. The qualification process of safety-critical avionics functions is troublesome and time-consuming. Most of the effort is spent on the qualification process to meet the qualification means or so-called objectives defined by recommended standards and guidelines. Therefore, tools or automation approaches are usually used to minimize the effort in the qualification process. In this research, the platform development approach called Selective Middleware (SMW) is investigated. It provides an efficient development approach for deploying a platform management middleware used for safety-critical avionics functions on IMA. The SMW approach provides a knowledge-based toolchain that automatically derives the platform management middleware instance from a manually designed high-level system architecture model. In addition to the platform management software, the required design and verification artifacts are also automatically generated. Therefore, this paper investigates to what extent the SMW approach reduces the qualification effort considering DO-178C, ARP4754A, and DO-297. To this object, a detailed assessment framework is defined in terms that captures and evaluates the impact on relevant effort reduction in each aircraft function life cycle process. The assessment framework is applied to the SMW approach concerning the guidelines, and a detailed and quantified analysis is performed.