Does Labview satisfy Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Standards?

[snarda]

Hello everyone,

My organization is going to propose Labview in an aerospace application in order to realize a monitor&control system included the human-machine interface.

We need evidences of suitability of Labview  to work in an aerospace/aircraft environment, in particular we need some safety-related assurance, so at first look standard FAA DO-278 seems to be applicable. It has to be considered that we're speaking about safety-relevant but not safety-critical software (software development assurance level (SWAL) equal to 5).

An European standard like EASA ED-109 can se enough too.

Do someone know or have heard about it?

Thanks a lot,

Simone

[Sam_Sharp]

My understanding of things like this is that the actual language has very little to do with achieving a certain safety standard and it is more about your programming methodology, rigorous testing, documentation and configuration/source management.

LabVIEW is used in some pretty high-tech fields (including aerospace/space, defence, medical, energy etc.) and in safety related applications so others have found ways to overcome these problems.

I think the only issues I can think of that might cause a problem are:

- There is no static analysis tool (there is the VI analyser, but it's not as comprehensive nor does it check against standards)

- Binary compatible executable code cannot be produced (if you build the exact software twice, the binaries will be different - this is due to some embedded timestamps in the executable).

Things like VI Analyser, Requirements Gateway, Unit Test Framework can help with the testing/verification.

[snarda]

Thanks a lot Sam.

In fact, as far as I can see, focus has to be put on testing. 

NI TestStand could be used, and in particular for FAA standards the Tool Qualification Kit by CertTech could be a possibility.

Ciao,

Simone