MATLAB and Simulink for Aerospace Certification Standards Compliance

You can use MATLAB and Simulink products to support key aerospace standards such as ARP4754B for developing civil aircraft and systems, ARP4761A for safety assessment, and DO-326A for security assessment.

With MBSE and Model-Based Design, you can use MATLAB and Simulink products, including System Composer, Simulink Fault Analyzer, and Requirements Toolbox to:

• Capture system requirements in textual and model formats
• Perform requirements validation
• Design and test robust system architectures
• Conduct thorough verification activities at different levels

The process connects higher-level system designs and lower-level software and hardware implementations, creating a digital thread and traceability essential for certification.

The DO-178C standard defines a set of objectives and activities for software to be approved for use in airborne systems. You can reduce risks and effort using Model-Based Design by:

• Iterating and refining software requirements by creating executable specifications
• Defining architecture and confirming your design choices for robustness and maintainability leveraging modeling and simulation
• Demonstrating code and executable coverage through back-to-back testing and traceability from requirements to tests
• Automating model and code review activities
• Reducing testing activities with formal methods

The DO-254 standard defines a set of objectives for the certification of Airborne Electronic Hardware (AEH). MATLAB and Simulink enable you to comply with DO-254 objectives and support its processes:

• Requirements management and tracing
• Conformance to design standards
• HDL code generation
• Verification and validation

Using Model-Based Design also helps you satisfy DO-254 objectives while realizing cost and time-to-market benefits associated with early verification of requirements, automated linking to requirements, model and code standards checking, code generation, report artifact generation, and test case reuse at different levels.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in production is growing, demanding model explanation, verification, and validation, especially in high-integrity embedded systems development. Ensuring AI's trustworthiness and reliability in these areas involves challenges such as ensuring data traceability, quality, and coverage and building repeatable, robust, interpretable, and scalable models for integration into larger systems. These efforts are further complicated by the lack of established industry-specific AI standards. MathWorks is part of the SAE WG-114, which is working on the definition of the certification standard.

The processes required to develop software and electronic hardware for space systems are defined by multiple regional standards, such as NASA Software Engineering Requirements (NPR 7150.2), European Cooperation for Space Standardization Space Engineering Software (ECSS-E-ST-40) and Software Product Assurance (ECSS-Q-ST-80), and European Cooperation for Space Standardization for FPGAs and ASICs Space Engineering (ECSS-E-ST-20-40C) and quality (ECSS-Q-ST-60-03C).

You can develop certifiable code that conforms to these standards by using Model-Based Design to:

• Maintain, allocate, and trace requirements and validate them through behavioral simulation
• Define and maintain architectures and link them natively to simulation
• Develop, test, and implement algorithms into software code
• Use formal methods to ensure design robustness and comply with static code analysis requirements
• Automate design flows and reporting