NASA Langley Formal Methods Research Program

The NASA Langley's Formal Methods Research Program of the NASA Langley Safety-Critical Avionics Systems Branch develops formal methods technology for the development of mission-critical and safety-critical digital systems of interest to NASA. These types of systems are being developed in support of the following NASA strategic initiatives:

• Sustainable air transportation system vehicle and airspace technologies
• Concepts and technologies to enable 100X capacity using trajectory-based operations (TBO)

If you are not familiar with formal methods, you might want to start your exploration by visiting our pages that try to answer the questions, Why is Formal Methods Necessary? and What is Formal Methods?

Research Project Areas

• Air Traffic Management Research
  • ACCoRD (Airborne Coordinated Conflict Resolution and Detection): A formal framework for the development of state-based separation assurance systems.
  • CPR (Compact Position Reporting): Formal analysis of the CPR algorithm, which is a safety-critical element of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) protocol.
  • DAIDALUS (Detect and Avoid Alerting Logic for Unmanned Systems): A collection of formally verified detect and avoid algorithms for Unmanned Aircraft Systems.
  • DAA-Displays: A library of interactive graphical display elements (widgets) for cockpit systems, and simulations tools supporting comparative analysis of cockpit displays.
  • ICAROUS (Independent Configurable Architecture for Reliable Operations of Unmanned Systems): A software architecture that enables the robust integration of mission specific software modules and highly assured core software modules for building safety-centric autonomous unmanned aircraft applications.
  • PolyCARP: A collection of formally verified algorithms and software for computations with polygons.
  • Early Air Traffic Management Research
• Verification Tool Research
  • PVS Theorem Prover Related Research
  • PRECiSA (Program Round-off Error Certifier via Static Analysis), a fully automatic analyzer for the estimation of round-off errors of floating-point valued functional expressions.
  • Kodiak, a software library for the solution of numerical, possibly non-linear, problems over hyper-rectangular variable and parameter domains.
  • VSCode-PVS: A modern IDE for PVS based on Visual Studio Code.
• Using Formal Methods in Certification
  • DO-333 Case Studies
  • Qualification of Formal Methods Tools under DO-330
    • Study by Rockwell Collins
    • Study by Kestrel Technology
• Spacecraft Autonomy and AI Planning
• Certification Oriented Software Research
• Accident Analysis
• Avionics Software Verification and Validation
• Fault Tolerance

Papers, Presentations, and Downloads

• Publications
• PVS Libraries

Past Research Projects

• Past Programs
• Early Projects

The tag identifies links that are outside the NASA domain