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Elucidation and Analysis of Specification Patterns in Aerospace System Telemetry

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NASA Formal Methods (NFM 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13260))

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Abstract

Experimental aerospace projects often require flight vehicle platforms for testing, such as high-altitude balloons, sounding rockets, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), and CubeSats. The system telemetry transmitted by these vehicles is crucial to understanding overall performance. A growing desire to implement greater levels of system autonomy and AI-enhanced control into these systems merits introducing rigorous safety analysis from formal methods techniques, such as Runtime Verification (RV). RV depends heavily upon the accuracy and robustness of the specifications it reasons over, and the task of developing a comprehensive set of system specifications often poses a significant challenge. To aid specification development for new systems, we provide an analysis on the process of implementing RV into four real aerospace systems of increasing complexity. We design and validate fourteen formal specifications for a real high-altitude balloon mission and draw on three past formal specification efforts on a sounding rocket, UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system, and CubeSat to compare specification patterns and overlapping system needs. We identify four common temporal logic subformulas for specifications within and between these systems, providing metrics on development resources, frequency, and perceived automation difficulty. We generalize our results and discuss considerations for automatically generating formal specifications in aerospace projects.

This project/material is based upon work supported by the Iowa Space Grant Consortium under NASA Award No. 80NSSC20M0107. Work partially supported by NSF CAREER Award CNS-1552934, NASA ECF NNX16AR57G, and NSF PFI: BIC grant CNS-1257011. Thanks to Kaili Henry and Yang He for their work on specification development and Matthew Nelson for providing resources from HABET. Reproducibility artifacts are available at http://temporallogic.org/research/AerospaceSystems-NFM22/.

Z. Luppen—The work in this manuscript was performed for the completion of a master’s degree prior to Mr. Luppen’s employment at SpaceX. The data referenced herein is not related to nor gathered from any SpaceX resources.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Hawthorne, CA, 90250, USA

    Zachary Luppen

  2. Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50010, USA

    Michael Jacks, Nathan Baughman, Muhamed Stilic, Ryan Nasers, Dae-Young Lee & Kristin Yvonne Rozier

  3. Collins Aerospace, Cedar Rapids, IA, 52498, USA

    Benjamin Hertz

  4. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    James Cutler

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  1. Zachary Luppen
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  2. Michael Jacks
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  4. Muhamed Stilic
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  9. Kristin Yvonne Rozier
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Correspondence to Zachary Luppen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Klaus Havelund

  3. National Institute of Aerospace, Hampton, VA, USA

    Ivan Perez

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Luppen, Z. et al. (2022). Elucidation and Analysis of Specification Patterns in Aerospace System Telemetry. In: Deshmukh, J.V., Havelund, K., Perez, I. (eds) NASA Formal Methods. NFM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13260. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06773-0_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06773-0_28

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