Software Engineering Institute

This paper was published in the proceedings of the AIAA SciTech Forum in January 2017 in Grapevine, Texas.

Distributed real-time embedded systems operating in uncertain and contested environments are of great relevance to the aerospace community. Such systems rely on components with unpredictable behavior to provide mission-critical capability. However, these components pose a challenge to assuring system-level safety and security. Runtime assurance (RA) has been used successfully to balance such capability with confidence in various non-DRTS domains. This paper presents a project we are pursuing with the aim of developing a provably correct approach for RA of DRTS. We discuss the core technical thrust areas, present two challenge problems we are using to guide our research, and conclude with an experimental testbed and initial results.