A Methodology for Developing a Verifiable Aircraft Engine Controller from Formal Requirements

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal, requirements-driven methodology for developing verifiable aircraft engine controllers, integrating formal requirements elicitation, simulation, and verification to improve safety and traceability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel methodology that formalizes natural-language requirements and integrates them with simulation and verification tools for aerospace systems.

Findings

Formal requirements can be automatically translated for verification

Methodology supports traceability from requirements to implementation

Applied successfully to an aircraft engine controller model

Abstract

Verification of complex, safety-critical systems is a significant challenge. Manual testing and simulations are often used, but are only capable of exploring a subset of the system's reachable states. Formal methods are mathematically-based techniques for the specification and development of software, which can provide proofs of properties and exhaustive checks over a system's state space. In this paper, we present a formal requirements-driven methodology, applied to a model of an aircraft engine controller that has been provided by our industrial partner. Our methodology begins by formalising the controller's natural-language requirements using the (pre-existing) Formal Requirements Elicitation Tool (FRET), iteratively, in consultation with our industry partner. Once formalised, FRET can automatically translate the requirements to enable their verification alongside a Simulink model of the aircraft engine controller; the requirements can also guide formal verification using other approaches. These two parallel streams in our methodology seek to combine the results from formal requirements elicitation, classical verification approaches, and runtime verification; to support the verification of aerospace systems modelled in Simulink, from the requirements phase through to execution. Our methodology harnesses the power of formal methods in a way that complements existing verification techniques, and supports the traceability of requirements throughout the verification process. This methodology streamlines the process of developing verifiable aircraft engine controllers, by ensuring that the requirements are formalised up-front and useable during development. In this paper we give an overview of (FRET), describe our methodology and work to-date on the formalisation and verification of the requirements, and outline future work using our methodology.