Design West: LDRA Certification Services streamlines FAA/EASA certification at a fixed price

Design West: LDRA Certification Services streamlines FAA/EASA certification at a fixed price

DESIGN West, San Jose, March 27, 2012. LDRA Certification Services (LCS), a division of LDRA, 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)

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 modelling 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.


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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 ensure 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.


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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 full capabilities of the LDRA FAA/ESEA-certifiable support package will be 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.

For more information email mark.james@ldra.com.

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