Design and development of certification compliance tool for airborne systems

Abstract

Certification compliance check for airborne software is very critical as it aids in the certification of the software. Since this compliance check is performed manually which is time-consuming and erroneous, an in-house developed Certification Compliance Tool (CCT) helps in checking the compliance as per RTCA DO-178B/C and generate artifacts depicting the magnitude of compliance. In order to generate the magnitude of compliance for the artifacts with respect to the Civil Aerospace Certification standard, RTCA DO-178B/C, an effective parsing technique is required to be incorporated to parse the artifact/s and generate compliance metric for the artifact/s. In this paper we propose a novel approach used in the design and development of an effective and efficient parsing technique incorporated in the indigenous software tool CCT used for compliance check. The tool checks the ratio of compliance of the artifacts generated across various phases of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process involved in the development of Safety-Critical software as per RTCA DO-178B/C. The indigenous tool accepts these artifacts as inputs and based on the software criticality level, it analyzes the compliance of these artifacts with the guidelines provided and recommended by RTCA DO-178B/C. The output of the tool provides the percentage of compliance of the artifacts that helps in accessing the Certification capabilities of the developed software. The percentage of compliance predicts the acceptance or rejection probabilities of the software being certified by the Certification Agency. The certification parser is developed using Python modules like Pywin32, Pypdf parsers and different approaches for Natural language processing using Python Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). The in-house tool replaces the manual effort by an individual/s which may be erroneous and impact the time-schedule, which compromises the software safety. The integration of the tool with commercial tools will help in analyzing the report/ documentation content with respect to the certification.