Objective
Commercial negotiations in the Aerospace business are changing towards including system development costs within the system production price. To remain competitive we must therefore reduce our development costs for the same, if not better, quality.
V&V accounts for typically 41% of our total software production costs and code corrections for typically 32% of our total maintenance costs. Aiming to reduce these costs by 10% will represent an achievable and worthwhile contribution towards this business goal.
These types of cost are common to all software producers, although their severity will depend upon the level of quality and certification required. This experiment will provide a practical illustration for a real time, safety critical control system that can be interpreted by other applications for their particular needs. No special skills will be required for this, only an understanding of the application.
THE EXPERIMENT
The technical objectives of the experiment are to integrate design and V&V by formalising the definitions and terms used in the design and to enforce the necessary constructs/constraints to ensure that these formal definitions and terms will always be correct in the code.
The experiment starts by producing formal definitions for commonly used definitions and terms within our projects. These are then used to specify and prove part of the baseline design in parallel with the baseline project design and V&V. The results from both can then be directly compared and the benefits quantified. The experiment is resourced from the project teams to ensure that the process is practical and acceptable to the ultimate users.
The baseline project will be a real time, safety critical control system for an aerospace application.
Lucas Aerospace, York Road, design, develop and manufacture real time, safety critical control systems. The site employs 880 people of which 130 are involved with engineering software.
EXPECTED IMPACT AND EXPERIENCE
It is expected to reduce the V&V and code correction costs by at least 10%. This will immediately increase our competitiveness, and justify the need for further improvements. How to use formal methods in a practical and acceptable manner to the project teams (users), and contribute to the personal development of engineers is also expected.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringcontrol systems
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measuresCoordinator
B90 4LA Solihull
United Kingdom