An Ontology-based Automation Framework for Continuous Compliance of Airborne Software

Abstract

Agile practices are designed to enable quick and incremental adaptations of existing software to new require- ments. However, when combined with the current assurance processes for airborne software, this necessitates more frequent and intricate updates to the accompanying documentation. In this paper, we present a concept for a continuous and incremental compliance evaluation framework that is adaptable to various certification methods. Our prototype implementation integrates with conventional Continuous Integration environments to ingest various software life-cycle artifacts and stores them in a unified graph representation. Based on this knowledge-graph, it performs automated compliance checks and documents its findings in a human-verifiable report, which is also extensible through external tools. We outline the basis of the implementation and discuss our experiences with applying it to itself.