Advances in Assuring Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Development Lifecycle and Their Applications in Aviation

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning(ML) in aviation has attracted attention from regulators. In order to prepare a means of compliance for the certification of trustworthiness AI within safety critical systems, this article reviews recent developments of aeronautical standard assuring AI development lifecycle and highlights three building blocks comprising the certification framework applicable to complex systems embedding ML components. To understand the challenges emerging during the development of ML models from the software engineering perspective, this article then presents the research of applying ML workflow in the development lifecycle of an intelligent Visual Guidance System(VGS) which is intended to guide the approach and landing in an emergency operation, by focusing on understanding how aircraft system and software designers could benefit from adapting the traditional engineering process to the ML-based approach and the necessary accommodations to support AI-enabled product certification. Finally, the practices of applying ML based approach are summarized, and the next steps of the research are given.