Avionic systems are becoming more and more complex. They incorporate heterogeneous components, perform a large number of functions, and interact with operators through advanced interfaces. As a consequence, it is becoming harder to manage all the aspects of safety assessment and to maintain the safety levels required by societal needs.

The FP5 project ESACS has shown the benefit of using formal techniques to assess aircraft safety. ISAAC builds upon and extends the results of ESACS to go a step further into the improvement and integration of safety activities of aeronautical complex systems. Potential benefits range from higher confidence in the safety of systems to increased competitiveness of European industries.

To reach the goals mentioned above, ISAAC will focus on the following three dimensions:

 

Extension of formal techniques to deal with human error, common cause analysis, mission analysis, and testability. This will help providing a more comprehensive tool-supported coverage of the safety analysis process.

Improvement of the ESACS notations to represent safety requirements and qualitative (timing) and quantitative aspects. This will help improving interaction and increasing the quality of the results provided by tools.

Integration, achieved through common methodological recommendations and shared libraries and interfaces. This is one of the keys to improve, e.g, the efficiency of industrial processes that more often rely on the use of different tools.

 

ISAAC`s results will be used by the partners to improve their safety process for their present and future programs. The results will also be disseminated to other areas, like, e.g., transportation (railway and automotive), industrial process control, energy production. The ISAAC consortium comprises aeronautical industries (Alenia, AIRBUS, Saab, SIA, Dassault) and research centres leaders in formal verification, safety assessment, and tool development (ITC, ONERA, OFFIS, PROVER).

The ISAAC project is funded by the European Commission under contract number FP6-2002-Aero-1-501848.