Quantifying Error Propagation in Data Flow Models

Model-based design is increasingly applied for the design and certification of flight-critical software. Software verification tools, however, have profound weaknesses in handling errors associated with signal values. Such errors can non-deterministically affect the performance and physical behavior of the cyber-physical system controlled by the software. We describe a scalable method that supports the analysis of signal value errors for applications specified as MATLAB Simulink data flow models. The approach explicitly propagates the errors associated with signal type and range bounds through the model and analyzes the possible effects of the errors on the cyber-physical system´s behavior. We demonstrate the run time and scalability of the proposed approach on a set of avionics models developed for a commercial aircraft.