Transitioning to new standards using model-based design

With the FAA and EASA adopting aviation standards such as DO-178C and ARP4754A, UAV software developers should familiarize themselves with these standards, particularly when transitioning to model-based design.

Few applications place more importance on verification, or prescribe more process guidance, than aviation. The FAA and its European equivalent, EASA, provide guidance using standards such as ARP4754 for aircraft systems and DO-178B for flight software. These standards are often used outside of civil aviation, in whole or in part, for applications including military aircraft and land vehicles. Adoption for UAV programs is rapidly growing because of the FAA’s recent decision to require UAS and OPA certification via FAA Order 8130.34A. UAV systems are heterogeneous, and not restricted just to flight software. Therefore, other standards are used such as DO-254 for hardware and DO-278 for ground and space software.

Used during system design
Reused as an entry point for software design
Elaborated on during detailed software design (for example, by discretizing continuous time blocks and changing double-precision data to single-precision or fixed-point)
Used as input for embedded code generation
The test cases for system requirement validation likewise are reused on the model, source code, and executable object code to perform functional testing and collect coverage metrics.

While not advocating for any particular mapping, the use and reuse of models for systems and software design along with code generation have long provided UAV system developers using MathWorks products of Simulink and Embedded Coder with streamlined processes. It is nice to see that this same approach is now clearly acknowledged as an acceptable means to certification by the governing standards. MathWorks provides verification tool qualification kits and workflow guidance regarding the use of model-based design for DO-178.