Safety-Critical System Development

Safety-critical system development requires safety certification. Examples for railways are EN 50128 (software) and EN 50129 (hardware). For aerospace there are DO-178 (software) and DO-254 (hardware). Since it it not practically possible to have 100% test coverage for complex systems, these documents require that development processes adhere to practices that minimize risk of catastrophic failure.

Companies with no experience in these standards grossly underestimate time and budget requirements of making the necessary changes for compliance. It takes at least two years to get a company from zero to certified. If the company has the vision to enter the aerospace market, compliance preparations have to be started before any system development contract, because to both change company culture and develop the system at the same time is a sure way to fail.

One way to avoid these standards is to come up with a simple design, provided that the requirements are simple enough. For example, an aircraft climate controller consisting of temperature and airflow sensors and fan and valve actuators could be realized with a simple PID controller using only operational amplifiers. Since it has no software and the relatively simple hardware can be tested with 100% coverage, there is no need to demonstrate that company development processes are sound.

Binary string permutations

Previously, I had solved printing all permutations of a string. As part of a programming contest, I solved binary string permutations using C++. What is interesting in this solution is that is uses a simple for loop and obtains each binary permutation by converting a decimal number to a binary number:

Hiding internal details of a C++ library

When you need to provide your simulation as an external library (dll, lib) to someone, you should simplify the API as much as possible so that you are able to provide the minimal amount of header files, without exposing details the user doesn't care about. You can achieve this by hiding all the internal dependencies in the implementation (cpp) file. If the user has to be able to create multiple (concurrent) simulations, you can use a static map to hold each simulation object. Here is an example (C++11):