Model-based engineering for critical systems.
In an increasingly digital age, safety-critical software is becoming an ever more vital component of military and aerospace projects. Given its importance, any issues with writing and certifying this software can negatively impact overall project success, increasing risk and causing potential delays.
As the role of safety-critical software grows, so does its complexity and the time required to create and test code. That’s why many projects now use a model-based design approach to programming. Essentially, this allows teams to create digital models of the software to be built, which can be run, checked, and refined through simulations – all before any code is written.
One of the key benefits here is that modeling languages allow domain experts, rather than software engineers, to write software specifications. As domain specialists understand more deeply what they want the safety-critical system to achieve, this ensures a closer fit to real-world requirements.
However, while this helps with the early stages of a project, often these models are then handed over to programmers to manually create code that matches the behavior of the original model. This adds time to the process and introduces the potential for programming errors that then need to be spotted and fixed later in the project, leading to potential delays.
