Verifying Safety Assurance in High Risk Embedded Systems

For human transport drones, low-earth orbiters, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, and autonomous planes, safety and integrity are mission critical. The same is true for today’s high-tech automotive systems supporting vision, autonomous driving, braking and more. Antoine Colin is a pioneer in safety-critical embedded systems. More than 20 years ago, he set his focus on critical timing analysis systems for his PhD and PostDoc, ultimately utilizing this knowledge to design Rapita’s RVS Aero security standards verification platform for Ada, C, & C++. It is used by engineers to develop compliant DO-178B/C and ED-12C certifiable multicore systems or equivalent military standards. He’s also behind Rapita’s RVS Auto verification platform that enables engineers to meet AUTOSAR and OSEK standards verification requirements laid out in ISO 26262 functional safety standards. “Safety critical systems include anything where failure is likely to result in death, injuries, loss of equipment or any catastrophic outcome you’d like to avoid,” Colin explains. And, he says, we need to shift the needle left to address increasingly complex code components embedded in these systems. This is especially true in Avionics, where engineers traditionally use a waterfall approach and verification is done on the right, or at the end of product development, he adds. “The cost of software has gone up massively in new airplanes, and the cost of verification is a large proportion of the cost of software,” Colin continues. “Finding defects late in the process is extremely costly. And in some cases, it would be impossible to update and fix code post deployment, for example, if that system is on Mars.” Join us and learn how to shift left on security testing and verification to build safe, reliable, and resilient safety-critical embedded systems.