Automated Testing of ARINC 661 Cockpit Display Systems: Factors to Accelerate DO-178C Certification

The development of Cockpit Display Systems (CDS) in the aeronautics industry has become increasingly complex over the years due to the growing sophistication of avionics User Applications and the need to meet safety-critical standards.This paper proposes an approach to automate testing of CDS compliant with the ARINC 661 standard. The approach reduces manual testing efforts while improving the quality of testing and the overall safety of the system.We find that this approach can yield up to 37% effort savings in a full-length CDS project, compared to existing model-based approaches, and up to 59% compared to traditional manual programming.We have implemented this approach in the 2023 R2 version of Ansys SCADE Solutions for ARINC 661.