Incremental functional certification for avionic functions reuse & evolution

These past years, development of avionic systems has increasingly evolved, from federated architectures to integrated ones, up to Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA), leading to continuously growing complexity. Following this evolution, certification process faced major break, evolving towards incremental acceptance. Novelty was brought through capability to incrementally accept an avionic system through IMA facilities, based on successive acceptance of hardware elements, then hosted software ones, achieving avionic functions. Incremental acceptance eases reuse of software and hardware elements that compose the platform. However, when considering the avionic functions, the reuse issue of their constitutive elements remains to address. Challenge is to preserve acquired certification credits while supporting function evolution for adaptation to the context, e.g., new aircraft. Based on ten years of acquired experience in incremental certification, we introduce in this paper an innovative top-down approach to face this challenge: the Incremental Functional Certification (IFC) approach. We propose a conceptual framework that promotes the capability to formalize certification credit for software assets, relying on existing regulations.