Verifying Cockpit Display Units as per the DO-178C Guideline

When United Airlines offered customers up to a million miles for finding security bugs in 2015, it had become evident how important safety and security is for the aerospace industry. Although the bug bounty program was targeted at bugs in the airlines' website and app interfaces, the message was clear – safety and security is paramount in the aerospace industry. And when it comes to in-flight avionics systems, the accuracy and precision of cockpit display units needs to be beyond perfect.

Designing Cockpit Display Units

As technological advances take over the avionic system market and with big players like Boeing implementing touchscreen flight displays for improved usability,  the process of developing, testing and verifying an aircraft’s cockpit display is getting complicated.

·     Embedding the latest technology, processing large number of signals, and prioritizing what information to show at any given time is becoming more and more challenging.

·       Since Cockpit Display Units are used to present critical information to the pilot, including the health of various aircraft systems, flight parameters, and navigational information, it is important that the display unit presents the most relevant information in a clear and concise manner.

·    Cockpit Display Unit design involves developing sophisticated logic to manage devices and display information on various display units.

·   Multiple logics for display need to be applied and prioritized to ensure the most important and relevant information is displayed at all times. 

Verifying as per DO-178C Guideline

As the demand for DO-178C training and best practices implementation gradually increases, verifying cockpit display unit components requires you to conduct software requirements analysis, design, testing, and Quality Assurance (QA) to assess and leverage compliance to FAA and EASA standards and expectations. Since DO-178C offers a strict certification requirement for avionics software, by examining the effects of a software failure in the system, appropriate steps can be taken to ensure safety and airworthiness of the Cockpit Display Units. By verifying Cockpit Display Units for compatibility, consistency and integrity, conformance to the DO-178C standard can be achieved. 

Using Model-based Design Approach for Verification

With model-based design, you can efficiently design and test complex control logic early in the development process, ensuring easy and quick workaround.

·    You can use the model throughout the design life-cycle: from desktop and real-time simulation, and then for implementation of the embedded software.

·   By conducting functional and structural verification on the design model, you can efficiently design the control logic for a Cockpit Display Unit and quickly discover and correct errors before the design is implemented in software.

Continuous Verification & Validation

Creating an executable system specification in the form of a model facilitates continuous verification and validation of Cockpit Display Unit components during the design cycle.

·     Since the cockpit display software is typically built one component at a time, you can develop and functionally verify the behavior of each component in a modular fashion.

·      Using an incremental testing approach, wherein functional and structural completeness of each component within the display unit is independently verified, you can validate whether the model meets the requirements before generating code and implementing the design on hardware.

·       By identifying errors early in the design and test phases, you can save substantial time and efforts and costs.

Ensuring Round-the-Clock Safety

As flying safely requires pilots to have heightened situational awareness and on-demand access to accurate information, high performance cockpit display units are crucial to maximize the display of critical flight information. For this reason, Cockpit Display Units need to be extremely accurate and need to efficiently manage multiple components aboard the aircraft. Using model-based design, you can conduct requirements trace-ability and functional and structural verification and validate if the system components meet the DO-178C guideline requirements and ensure round-the-clock safety of air travel.