Formal specification and analysis of airborne mission systems

The airborne mission system in military aircraft is a complex real time system consisting of a mission control computer, sensors, displays, controls, and data buses that provide interfaces between sub-systems. The complexity and real time requirements of airborne mission systems represent major challenges to the Australian Defence Force during acquisition, upgrades, and maintenance. This has motivated research into the application of formal techniques to model the mission system architecture, and to investigate and predict the effects of avionics upgrades on the behaviour and performance of the integrated mission system. We are currently using coloured Petri nets to model and analyse airborne mission systems. This paper presents two aspects of our ongoing research using coloured Petri nets. Firstly, we present some analysis for a generic airborne mission system based on a previously published model. Then we describe an initial application of our modelling framework to the AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft's airborne mission system.