Reducing Verification and Certification Effort in Avionics 

Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies stream­lines soft­ware ver­i­fi­ca­tion and accel­er­ate cer­ti­fi­ca­tion activ­i­ties with auto­mat­ed sta­t­ic analy­sis and test­ing work­flows.

What is it about

Help­ing Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies auto­mate ver­i­fi­ca­tion and com­pli­ance work­flows for DO-178C and DO-254 projects, reduc­ing repet­i­tive man­u­al effort and speed­ing up avion­ics soft­ware cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. 

Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies LLC is a lead­ing AS9100C-cer­ti­fied com­pa­ny pro­vid­ing full-life­cy­cle hard­ware and soft­ware engi­neer­ing, safe­ty-crit­i­cal and high-integri­ty prod­uct develop­ment and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion ser­vices world­wide to the civil and mil­i­tary avion­ics indus­try. 
Head­quar­tered in Lawrenceville, Geor­gia, Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies spe­cialise in in-flight, cock­pit dis­play and advanced vision sys­tem develop­ment with ser­vices includ­ing safe­ty engi­neer­ing as well as design, imple­men­ta­tion, ver­i­fi­ca­tion and val­i­da­tion to meet DO-178C (soft­ware) and DO-254 (hard­ware) stan­dards. 

Evaluating the LDRA tool suite 

Some of the world’s most rep­utable avi­a­tion com­pa­nies rely on Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies’ high-qual­i­ty, stan­dards com­pli­ant, and cost-com­pet­i­tive develop­ment ser­vices, - so when the com­pa­ny was build­ing its design infra­struc­ture, they spent time com­par­ing soft­ware ver­i­fi­ca­tion tool suites to find the best solu­tion.

Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies is cur­rent­ly using the LDRA tool suite for sta­t­ic analy­sis, unit-test­ing, low-level ver­i­fi­ca­tion and struc­tur­al cov­er­age analy­sis of the embed­ded soft­ware for advanced vision sys­tems and iner­tial mea­sure­ment units used in stand­by instru­ment sys­tems. 

Sales and Mar­ket­ing Exec­u­tive Robert Atkin­son out­lined why Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies under­took this eval­u­a­tion process, “Many of our engi­neers had excel­lent pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence with the LDRA tool suite, how­ev­er, we want­ed to make sure it could con­tin­ue to pro­vide the best results as our design cycles got short­er and designs became more com­plex. The LDRA tool suite came out on top in our eval­u­a­tion of low-level ver­i­fi­ca­tion tools for tar­get com­put­er sys­tems, and we have been using it suc­cess­ful­ly for almost 3 years now. We are cur­rent­ly look­ing at imple­ment­ing even more of the mod­ules in the LDRA tool suite as our busi­ness grows.” 

Technical Support: An Invaluable Resource 

Once the engi­neers at Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies select­ed the LDRA tool suite, they need­ed to come up to speed quick­ly to begin ver­i­fy­ing designs on extreme­ly tight sched­ules. They relied on the TASKING sup­port team to help them learn the tools and inte­grate them with the tar­get embed­ded sys­tems.  

“With most com­plex tool suites, it takes days to get set up using a com­bi­na­tion of instruc­tion man­u­als and the tool-provider’s tech­ni­cal sup­port,” “Set up almost always takes a lot longer than you expect, but we had the oppo­site expe­ri­ence with the LDRA tool suite. It took less time than we expect­ed because we had a skilled tech­ni­cal sup­port engi­neer there to resolve any issues quick­ly.” 

-— Stephen Spence, a senior avion­ics soft­ware engi­neer at Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies.

Automation: Speeding the Verification Process and Making it (Almost) Fun! 

Soft­ware develop­ment, require­ments trace­abil­i­ty and ver­i­fi­ca­tion are mon­u­men­tal tasks for avion­ics appli­ca­tions. Thou­sands of lines of code must be writ­ten, checked and rechecked. For Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies, inte­grat­ing the LDRA tool suite into their work­flows auto­mat­ed a great deal of the ver­i­fi­ca­tion process and dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduced the ver­i­fi­ca­tion cycle and time to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. 

“TASKING’s LDRA tools auto­mate the part of soft­ware engi­neer­ing that every­one hates - the mun­dane, repet­i­tive ver­i­fi­ca­tion tasks,” Spence added. “An engi­neer often has to go over 1000 lines of code to ensure com­pli­ance to cod­ing stan­dards such as MISRA (Motor Indus­try Soft­ware Reli­a­bil­i­ty Asso­ci­a­tion). That task may take all day, if not more. Hav­ing a tool that will find 99% of cod­ing stan­dard vio­la­tions in sec­onds is great.”

Stepping Up to the DO-254 and DO-178C Certification Challenge 

Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies is known for its in-depth under­stand­ing of the strict require­ments-dri­ven process­es man­dat­ed by the DO-254 and DO-178 stan­dards for the develop­ment of com­mer­cial air­borne elec­tron­ic sys­tems. Accord­ing to the company’s engi­neers, the LDRA tool suite and doc­u­men­ta­tion are extreme­ly well matched to safe­ty-crit­i­cal design flows and in-house method­olo­gies that help achieve stan­dards cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in much short­er time­frames. Par­tic­u­lar­ly valu­able fea­tures of LDRA tool suite include: 

  • Well organ­ised web page-based out­put high­light­ing code cov­er­age and sta­t­ic analy­sis results achieved dur­ing low level ver­i­fi­ca­tion 
  • Rapid regres­sion analy­sis 
  • Struc­tur­al cov­er­age results 
  • Robust sta­t­ic analy­sis capa­bil­i­ty 
  • Exten­sive unit tests 
  • Easy inte­gra­tion into the DO-178C design flow 

“Achiev­ing DO-254 and DO-178C cer­ti­fi­ca­tion using man­u­al meth­ods or with other tools would be a strug­gle, espe­cial­ly when you have to make design changes, then go back and ver­i­fy the impact those changes make,” “TASKING’s LDRA tools stream­lined and sim­pli­fied the process and helped us to pro­duce the level of code qual­i­ty that our cus­tomers demand in record time.” 

-— Adam Simp­son, media and mar­ket­ing man­ag­er at Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies.

LDRA tool suite Facilitates Design and Customer Collaboration 

Choos­ing ver­i­fi­ca­tion tools that are also part of their cus­tomers’ design flows fur­ther enhances Rich­land Tech­nolo­gies’ col­lab­o­ra­tive approach to cus­tomer engage­ment.
 
“When we work with multi-bil­lion dol­lar avi­a­tion com­pa­nies who also use LDRA tools, it’s much eas­i­er to col­lab­o­rate,” Atkin­son stat­ed. “For exam­ple, we were work­ing on a remote data con­cen­tra­tor unit design with a large Euro­pean avion­ics com­pa­ny and were able to eas­i­ly pass data back and forth between our teams in Atlanta and Europe. This is not an uncom­mon way of work­ing, but the more col­lab­o­ra­tive you can be, the eas­i­er it is to com­plete the design and effi­cient­ly meet cer­ti­fi­ca­tion require­ments.” 


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