An Adoption of Automation Framework for Model-Based Testing to System Testing for Airborne Safety Critical Systems

With many aircraft systems getting digitalized, the complexity of flight software has increased multi-fold. The need for a fully automated System Test facility to certify the flight software is an essential part to receiving flight clearance. System Testing for an Airborne Application is critical as it demonstrates the system functionality, performance, and safety features against the top-level system requirements. In the final stage, where the flight software gets flight clearance from the certification team, the testing platform on which the software is certified requires it to be real-time, automated, user-friendly, and modifiable. Model-based Testing (MBT) is emerging as an exciting approach to creating test architectures that cover model development and physical testing. This paper discusses the MBT approach where the complex flight software developed is integrated into the Model-Based Software Engineering (MBSE) environment to develop highly optimized workflows and test case capabilities. The end-to-end model-based approach demonstrates the integrity of the flight software development to the requirements of functionality, performance, and safety by providing traceability to the design and test environment. The result of the proposed Model-based testing framework provides a seamless automated transition of the flight software from the design to the flight simulator environment; to the real-time test environment demonstrating the efficacy of the established framework. The reuse of test scenarios/cases, the benchmarking results, and the test coverage metrics are discussed to justify the MBT framework for the Safety Critical Airborne application such as the Brake Management System.