3 Reasons Model-Based Design is the Key to Your Military Mission Software Development

Reliable and secure software is critical in reaching any mission’s objectives. System engineers designing advanced defense technologies need to navigate several challenges, such as the growing number and complexity of components and data, as well as the numerous communication protocols.  

The key to overcoming these challenges is model-based design. A model-based approach can reduce development time and accelerate certification — while integrating new functionality at a much lower cost. Let’s explore how.

1. Develop Reliable Mission-Critical Software 2X Faster

The software development cycle is divided into several phases, from software requirements to coding, to the verification and validation phase. At each step, it is important to avoid rewriting the software description and prevent ambiguity and inaccuracy in the software specifications. In a traditional manual coding approach, this rewriting is not only expensive, but also error prone. The purpose of many tedious verification and review activities is to detect the errors introduced during transformations from one written form to another.

With model-based software development tools, such as Ansys SCADE solutions, different levels of the models are managed in a holistic and modular approach with end-to-end traceability among requirements, design and tests. SCADE-produced code is simple, deterministic and efficient. It optimizes resources, in terms of memory and execution time.

2. Adhere to Open and Interoperable Standards such as ARINC 661 and the FACE^TM Technical Standard

Software integration is one of the most complex and costly aspects in the software development lifecycle, involving many stakeholders and levels of integration. Thus, complying to formally defined technical standards with clearly defined interfaces makes it easier for system integrators to deliver complex systems faster.

You can leverage model-based software development and automatic qualified code generation to design software that is fully traceable to the functional and operational levels of the mission system and comply with standards like ARINC 661, DO-178C up to Level A and the FACE^TM Technical Standard.

For example, with Ansys 2021 R1, SCADE provides full support of ARINC 661 interfaces for Cockpit Display Systems up to Supplement 7 and FACE 3.0 for military avionics development. This enables reliable, interoperable and portable software, driving rapid integration and reusability across defense platforms.

3. Reduce Effort and Cost by up to 50%

Satisfying the DO-178C objectives while promoting an efficient development and verification strategy is possible. A model-based approach aims at reducing costs and increasing productivity by designing and verifying software at the earliest stages of development – so safety is built in. Engineers can also improve confidence in the final code through certified code generation and reduce costs by removing costly verification activities at the code level.

The SCADE development environment complies with the regulatory processes necessary for rigorous software development and verification up to certification. SCADE supports the automated production and verification of a large part of the development life-cycle elements, which can account for up to 80%of the development budget for high-integrity software.

Learn how organizations such as L3Harris Technologies and Physical Optics Corporation use Ansys SCADE to leverage model-based software development and qualified code generation.