FAA Overview: Software Certification for Avionics

Project: NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR): Intelligent Information Processing System for Enhanced Safety in the NAS
Project Acronym: IIPS

Technical Abstract: IIPS is an information-centric, decision support, action-monitoring tool that focuses on information disconnects between actors or systems in a well-defined context and resolves those disconnects through progressively adaptive notifications. IIPS can also adapt to situations where information overload can saturate communications channels and overload the decision maker by providing the most relevant information at the most opportune time. The system goals include to improve safety performance for high-reliability flight systems, to permit scalable application from the flight deck to the systems operating at the level of the National Airspace System, and to permit easy integration of multiple disparate information sources using an open system architecture by using techniques which permit delaying unnecessary system constraints throughout the development process.

One of the Technical Objectives (TO) for IIPS namely, TO #4 is to Identify and formalize the software development requirements for eventual deployment to an environment requiring FAA certification.

The presentation provided here is the outcome of research associated with this TO #4. Some of the information provided here is common to any FAA certification specifically associated with software design assurance and hence is provided in this forum for information sharing.