Timed Discrete-Event Simulation of Aviation Scenarios

Abstract

Ensuring systems behave as they are expected is unavoidable in the context of critical environments. In the aviation industry, certification standards provide rules and protocols to ensure correct maneuvers with respect to logical or timed events. These are targeted to computer-intensive systems as well as to human flight crews. In this setting, we are interested in the modeling and simulation of event-driven and time-driven behaviors at a high level. This study focuses on the TESL language [1] that provides a logical framework for timed behaviors with monitoring and testing features. In particular, we model various aviation scenarios and focus our study on fault monitoring. Multi-pilot aircrafts. The Airbus A320 aircraft family is a well-known system made of fault-tolerant components based on redundancy and dissimilarity. Traverse [12, 13] reported that the aircraft primary control surface computers were designed by different design analysts on independent architectures. This case of heterogeneity clearly exhibits how a multi-paradigm environment needs to be unified in order to be validated at a higher-level. Unmanned aircrafts. Furthermore, recent advances in unmanned aircrafts [14, 15] make the topic of verification and validation even more crucial due to the need of safe, reliable and fully automated software-intensive systems [16, 17] where, accordingly, design and test procedures tend to be fully automated.