LDRA Certification Services Streamlines FAA/EASA Certification at a Fixed Prices

San Jose, CA, March 29, 2012 --(PR.com)-- Avionics experts using a tailored certification management solution guide clients through to certification readiness.

LDRA Certification Services (LCS), a division of LDRA, the leading provider of safety-critical software verification tools and software best practices for the past 40 years, is announcing the first comprehensive and fully compliant FAA/EASA certification solution. This offering brings together a team of certification industry experts who are fully accredited across all aviation disciplines along with certification-readiness tools tailored for the needs of the avionics industry.

LCS provides comprehensive support, overseeing and guiding certification applicants through a wide-range of aviation standards:

• Aircraft & Systems Development (ARP-4754A)
• Safety Assessment (ARP-4761)
• Integrated Modular Avionics (DO-297)
• Flight Electronic Hardware (DO-254)
• Flight Software (DO-178B/C)
• Ground Systems (DO-278/A)

Proficient in both commercial and military airworthiness, LCS addresses critical project requirements that relate to certification, including the management, planning, staff training, development, verification and production. While analyzing certification and safety needs from a total aircraft system perspective, LCS ensures that the individual and exacting aviation standards can be met at a fixed price.

Leading the LCS team is Todd R. White, a systems and equipment FAA Designated Engineering Representative (DER) with Level A authority on all aircraft systems and equipment for both software and airborne electronic hardware. Todd’s expertise is flanked by Marty Gasiorowski, a systems, safety, software and complex electronic hardware FAA DER, and Dr. Holly Hildreth, a safety engineer with expertise in a wide range of US and international standards, to provide certification expertise in DO-178/DO-278, DO-254, DO-297, IEC 61508, IEC 62304, ISO 26262, IEEE 1012:2004 and CENELEC EN 50128. Well-known and highly regarded in the certification community, Todd R. White and Marty Gasiorowski played an instrumental role in crafting the RTCA DO-178C standard.

With development and verification tools qualified for avionics standard objectives, the LCS team successfully applies these tools across the product lifecycle. To address the new initiatives for model-based development, LDRA offers out-of-the-box integration of the LDRA tool suite and industry-leading modeling tool MathWork’s Simulink. Using this integration, avionics applicants gain model and target-execution coverage. The assured consistency of the same tool performing code coverage on the host and target systems reduces the costs and risks associated with the avionics industry’s best practice of back-to-back testing.

“LDRA Certification Services has proved invaluable for a cargo handling and aerial delivery system on the Embraer KC-390 that DRS Defense Solutions must certify to Levels A and C,” confirmed Devin Mosley, Software Engineer, DRS Training & Control Systems. “The delivery system provides troop and cargo transport, aerial delivery, in-flight refueling and medical evacuations. LCS has helped us establish the correct process and methodology to ensure that our delivery system, which can involve complex parachute delivery and extraction, correctly complies with the structural specifications custom configured to meet stringent weight limitations.”

“Today’s software systems with all their safety-critical electronics represent a complex matrix of specifications, interrelationships and proofs that the system fully functions as intended,” said Todd R. White. “Bringing all this code into compliance is a huge task. Our expertise minimizes the effort.”

LCS provides comprehensive support to avionics companies across the entire development and production lifecycle. The LCS team can advise on new code development processes as well as the gap analysis required to establish a program for bringing millions of lines of legacy code into compliance. Training and continuous involvement through audits and more general LCS design and verification support ensures client success.

From requirements definition and traceability to MC/DC code coverage analysis, unit testing and validation, the LDRA tool suite delivers a broad range of qualifiable verification capabilities that support FAA/ESEA certification objectives at all levels. The LDRA tool suite manages and tracks all artifacts to achieve complete bidirectional traceability through all aspects of development, down to object code and on-target testing. A DO-178-specific template streamlines avionics regulatory processes, outlining necessary certification methodology and requirements. Modules within the LDRA tool suite manage and graphically depict the complex relationships between objectives, requirements, code and tests, automatically documenting all aspects of analysis, code correction and validation.

Additional LCS support for FAA/ESEA certification is offered by two LDRA Tool Qualification Support Packages (TQSPs):

• Code Coverage TQSP—the LDRA tool suite with an MC/DC code coverage validation test suite
• Static Analysis TQSP—the LDRA tool suite with a coding rules validation test suite

The combined offering ensures avionics vendors have all that they need to achieve certification readiness.

The full capabilities of the LDRA FAA/ESEA-certifiable support package was demonstrated at DESIGN West in San Jose, March 27, 29 in Booth 1337. Visit LDRA to see how a software project can achieve certifiable readiness via life cycle traceability from requirements creation through development and validation.

Please send reader inquiries to:
Mark James
Email: mark.james@ldra.com