System Architecture Virtual Integration: An Industrial Case Study

The aerospace industry is experiencing exponential growth in the size and complexity of onboard software. It also seeing a significant increase in errors and rework of that software. All of those factors contribute to greater cost; the current development process is reaching the limit of affordability of building safe aircraft. An international consortium of aerospace companies with government participation has initiated the System Architecture Virtual Integration (SAVI) program, whose goal is to achieve an affordable solution through a paradigm shift of "integrate then build." Key concepts of this paradigm shift are an architecture-centric model repository as single source for analytical system models, accessed through a model bus, used as a single source for analytical models, and multi-level, multi-fidelity analysis of multiple operational quality attributes of the system and embedded software system architecture. The result is discovery of system-level faults earlier in the life cycle-reducing risk, cost, and development time. The first phase of this program demonstrated the feasibility of this new development process through a proof of concept which is the topic of this report.