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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 114 - Cleveland, Ohio - October 2014
Agenda Location	6 SUBCOMMITTEE E – FLIGHT, PROPULSION, AND AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE CONTROL SYSTEMS 6.1 Run Time Assurance Design Considerations for Advanced Aerospace Applications
Title	Run Time Assurance Design Considerations for Advanced Aerospace Applications
Presenter	John Schierman
Affiliation	Barron Associates
Available Downloads*	presentation
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Abstract	Mission and safety requirements for current- and next-generation aerospace vehicles have given rise to flight software with an ever-increasing level of complexity and autonomy. "Intelligence" is built into new and emerging designs through the development of novel algorithms that detect, learn, adapt, switch modes, coordinate, plan, etc. For manned vehicles, the complexity of safety-monitoring, weapons, mission planning, envelope cueing, flight control, and other systems is such that sophisticated software is required to assist the human pilot in accomplishing the mission. And, of course, unmanned systems require an even greater level of sophistication and autonomy since the human pilot (capable of intelligent contingency planning and reasoning) is no longer part of the system. Further, human-machine cyber physical systems must have the intelligence to adjust their level of autonomy in real time, depending on changes in the system, environment, or other conditions. Under such scenarios, the control software should complete selected tasks automatically, allowing the human operator to take on a managerial role. As the complexity of flight controllers grows linearly, the cost associated with V&V has grown exponentially. The current process of verifying and validating the system software involves exhaustive offline testing of every possible state of the system. Although this has worked well for classical control systems and heritage software, it is widely recognized that this will be an untenable undertaking for adaptive and non-deterministic algorithms. Current-generation controllers are already reaching a level of complexity that pushes the envelopes of existing V&V approaches, with little hope for affordable V&V of next-generation intelligent systems. However, it is expected that through the combined use of new advances in design-time or offline V&V approaches along with the use of a Run Time Assurance (RTA) architecture during online operation, we can provably bound the system behavior. There are a number of advanced systems and systems-of-systems concepts that are of great interest to NASA, the Air Force, and other branches of the DoD, and it is for these reasons that there is interest in further developing the RTA concept so these advanced systems can be certified for fielded operations. In 2004 the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) embarked on the Flight Critical System Software Initiative, funding the Certification Techniques for Advanced Flight Critical Systems (CerTA FCS) and other related programs. These programs were intended to advance the state of the art in V&V techniques through formal methods approaches for design-time analysis, and run time monitoring for operational protection of uncertifiable code. Barron Associates was, from the beginning, involved in these efforts through the SBIR program. Our focus has been on developing run time monitoring systems for aircraft inner-loop control systems. Barron Associates was subsequently involved in a Lockheed-Martin effort in which we developed a run time monitoring approach for an outer-loop guidance autoland system. This project entailed a substantial effort to develop a "ground-laying" implementable run time safety assurance approach. In a current SBIR Phase III follow on project, Barron Associates is working to (a) further mature and more broadly develop RTA technologies, investigating inner-loop control, outer-loop guidance, and mission/navigation system applications (b) demonstrate formal methods approaches for certifying advanced elements within a system protected by RTA monitoring, (c) select one or more applicable challenge problem demonstration platforms, from which to use in the technology development and to showcase the matured technologies, (d) solicit feedback from certification authorities regarding technical hurdles in the V\&V process for RTA systems, and (e) prepare the RTA system for follow-on flight testing. We are currently investigating complex cyber physical systems-of-systems as one of the challenge problems to aid in the development and demonstration of advances in RTA approaches.