83,705 research outputs found
Technology Changes In Aeronautical Systems
International audienceGuidance for producing airborne software today must be developed to the expectations of ED- 12B/DO-178B “Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification”.[1] EASA and the FAA have formally recognized this ‘objective-based’ aviation software guidance and it has proven to be extremely successful in the development of safe, in-service, operational aircraft containing software. Since its publication in 1992, ED-12B/DO- 178B has gain respect as a standard that meets the goals of safety in the airborne community. However recent technology advances such as Object Oriented Technology, Model Based Design, Software Tools and Formal Methods have applied methods that require elaboration of how the ED-12B/DO-178B objectives will be met. This paper discusses the approach for introducing new technologies with legacy aviation standards
No Trust without regulation!
The explosion in the performance of Machine Learning (ML) and the potential
of its applications are strongly encouraging us to consider its use in
industrial systems, including for critical functions such as decision-making in
autonomous systems. While the AI community is well aware of the need to ensure
the trustworthiness of AI-based applications, it is still leaving too much to
one side the issue of safety and its corollary, regulation and standards,
without which it is not possible to certify any level of safety, whether the
systems are slightly or very critical.The process of developing and qualifying
safety-critical software and systems in regulated industries such as aerospace,
nuclear power stations, railways or automotive industry has long been well
rationalized and mastered. They use well-defined standards, regulatory
frameworks and processes, as well as formal techniques to assess and
demonstrate the quality and safety of the systems and software they develop.
However, the low level of formalization of specifications and the uncertainties
and opacity of machine learning-based components make it difficult to validate
and verify them using most traditional critical systems engineering methods.
This raises the question of qualification standards, and therefore of
regulations adapted to AI. With the AI Act, the European Commission has laid
the foundations for moving forward and building solid approaches to the
integration of AI-based applications that are safe, trustworthy and respect
European ethical values. The question then becomes "How can we rise to the
challenge of certification and propose methods and tools for trusted artificial
intelligence?
Safety-Critical Systems and Agile Development: A Mapping Study
In the last decades, agile methods had a huge impact on how software is
developed. In many cases, this has led to significant benefits, such as quality
and speed of software deliveries to customers. However, safety-critical systems
have widely been dismissed from benefiting from agile methods. Products that
include safety critical aspects are therefore faced with a situation in which
the development of safety-critical parts can significantly limit the potential
speed-up through agile methods, for the full product, but also in the
non-safety critical parts. For such products, the ability to develop
safety-critical software in an agile way will generate a competitive advantage.
In order to enable future research in this important area, we present in this
paper a mapping of the current state of practice based on {a mixed method
approach}. Starting from a workshop with experts from six large Swedish product
development companies we develop a lens for our analysis. We then present a
systematic mapping study on safety-critical systems and agile development
through this lens in order to map potential benefits, challenges, and solution
candidates for guiding future research.Comment: Accepted at Euromicro Conf. on Software Engineering and Advanced
Applications 2018, Prague, Czech Republi
A Framework to Evaluate Software Developer’s Productivity The VALORTIA Project
Currently, there is a lack in companies developing software in relation to assessing their staff’s productivity
before executing software projects, with the aim of improving effectiveness and efficiency. QuEF (Quality
Evaluation Framework) is a framework that allows defining quality management tasks based on a model.
The main purpose of this framework is twofold: improve an entity’s continuous quality, and given a context,
decide between a set of entity’s instances on the most appropriate one. Thus, the aim of this paper is to
make this framework available to evaluate productivity of professionals along software development and
select the most appropriate experts to implement the suggested project. For this goal, Valortia platform,
capable of carrying out this task by following the QuEF framework guidelines, is designed. Valortia is a
platform to certify users' knowledge on a specific area and centralize all certification management in its
model by means of providing protocols and methods for a suitable management, improving efficiency and
effectiveness, reducing cost and ensuring continuous quality.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-
Using quality models in software package selection
The growing importance of commercial off-the-shelf software packages requires adapting some software engineering practices, such as requirements elicitation and testing, to this emergent framework. Also, some specific new activities arise, among which selection of software packages plays a prominent role. All the methodologies that have been proposed recently for choosing software packages compare user requirements with the packages' capabilities. There are different types of requirements, such as managerial, political, and, of course, quality requirements. Quality requirements are often difficult to check. This is partly due to their nature, but there is another reason that can be mitigated, namely the lack of structured and widespread descriptions of package domains (that is, categories of software packages such as ERP systems, graphical or data structure libraries, and so on). This absence hampers the accurate description of software packages and the precise statement of quality requirements, and consequently overall package selection and confidence in the result of the process. Our methodology for building structured quality models helps solve this drawback.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Can Component/Service-Based Systems Be Proved Correct?
Component-oriented and service-oriented approaches have gained a strong
enthusiasm in industries and academia with a particular interest for
service-oriented approaches. A component is a software entity with given
functionalities, made available by a provider, and used to build other
application within which it is integrated. The service concept and its use in
web-based application development have a huge impact on reuse practices.
Accordingly a considerable part of software architectures is influenced; these
architectures are moving towards service-oriented architectures. Therefore
applications (re)use services that are available elsewhere and many
applications interact, without knowing each other, using services available via
service servers and their published interfaces and functionalities. Industries
propose, through various consortium, languages, technologies and standards.
More academic works are also undertaken concerning semantics and formalisation
of components and service-based systems. We consider here both streams of works
in order to raise research concerns that will help in building quality
software. Are there new challenging problems with respect to service-based
software construction? Besides, what are the links and the advances compared to
distributed systems?Comment: 16 page
Management plan documentation standard and Data Item Descriptions (DID). Volume of the information system life-cycle and documentation standards, volume 2
This is the second of five volumes of the Information System Life-Cycle and Documentation Standards. This volume provides a well-organized, easily used standard for management plans used in acquiring, assuring, and developing information systems and software, hardware, and operational procedures components, and related processes
The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area
This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management
Paving the Roadway for Safety of Automated Vehicles: An Empirical Study on Testing Challenges
The technology in the area of automated vehicles is gaining speed and
promises many advantages. However, with the recent introduction of
conditionally automated driving, we have also seen accidents. Test protocols
for both, conditionally automated (e.g., on highways) and automated vehicles do
not exist yet and leave researchers and practitioners with different
challenges. For instance, current test procedures do not suffice for fully
automated vehicles, which are supposed to be completely in charge for the
driving task and have no driver as a back up. This paper presents current
challenges of testing the functionality and safety of automated vehicles
derived from conducting focus groups and interviews with 26 participants from
five countries having a background related to testing automotive safety-related
topics.We provide an overview of the state-of-practice of testing active safety
features as well as challenges that needs to be addressed in the future to
ensure safety for automated vehicles. The major challenges identified through
the interviews and focus groups, enriched by literature on this topic are
related to 1) virtual testing and simulation, 2) safety, reliability, and
quality, 3) sensors and sensor models, 4) required scenario complexity and
amount of test cases, and 5) handover of responsibility between the driver and
the vehicle.Comment: 8 page
On the tailoring of CAST-32A certification guidance to real COTS multicore architectures
The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multicores in real-time industry is on the rise due to multicores' potential performance increase and energy reduction. Yet, the unpredictable impact on timing of contention in shared hardware resources challenges certification. Furthermore, most safety certification standards target single-core architectures and do not provide explicit guidance for multicore processors. Recently, however, CAST-32A has been presented providing guidance for software planning, development and verification in multicores. In this paper, from a theoretical level, we provide a detailed review of CAST-32A objectives and the difficulty of reaching them under current COTS multicore design trends; at experimental level, we assess the difficulties of the application of CAST-32A to a real multicore processor, the NXP P4080.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant
TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence.
Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal grant RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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