White Papers from Foliage are your source for information on the latest technology developments that affect the aerospace industry.
Value Driven Analysis (VDA) is a Foliage–developed process for ensuring alignment between overarching business and product strategies and the engineering team’s tradeoff decisions. It facilitates synergy between each of the stakeholder groups resulting in a concise, easy to understand product strategy. This in turn helps ensure that product development investments yield optimal return.
Author: Alan Aghan, Principal Engineer
In the foreseeable future there will be an increasing shortage of technically skilled and experienced workers in the Aerospace industry, and the situation is reaching crisis level. This paper discusses this assertion, its causes, its implications and some possible ways to address the problem.
Author: Hoyt Lougee; Brian Bowe; Vince Dovydaitis; Garrett Thurston
The FAA is considering adopting the commercial-avionics guidance RTCA DO-178B for the certifiability of UAS embedded software. This paper identifies a practical approach to identifying system criticality, which is integral to the process of certifying UAS software. In addition, this paper will consider inherent risks and failures of UAS within a variety of operating environments and will conclude with a concrete proposal for a UAS criticality stratification approach.
Author: Ron Rubbico, Co-CEO; Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
This paper examines the factors that are critical to align business and technology strategies to extract the most market leverage and top-line growth from combined or restructured product lines. The paper draws from approaches achieving success in other heavily consolidating industries and applies them to the unique challenges facing Aerospace manufacturers.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager; Garrett Thurston, Sales Manager, Aerospace Division
This white paper shows how the FAA-adopted software guidance for manned-applications—RTCA/DO-178B, Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification; and RTCA/DO-278, Guidelines for Communication, Navigation, Surveillance, and Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) Systems Software Integrity Assurance—can be applied to UAV certification.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division; Norm Delisle, Engineering Vice President
This paper presents proven approaches for establishing and aligning effective Business, Product, and Technology strategies that enable an organization to ensure that downstream tradeoffs are made in the context of business goals and objectives.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
This paper offers an analysis of requirements and their tremendous impact on the cost, duration, and predictability of the critical software development task. It also presents common pitfalls and best practices for writing successful requirements that lead to lower costs, shortened schedules, enhanced predictability, and—ultimately—marketplace success.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
A solid reuse strategy is critical in maintaining your competitive advantage with products containing certifiable software. Foliage presents a new approach to Reuse Planning based on 13 years of experience developing certified software and technology strategy consulting.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
We present a Foliage case study to illustrate the flexibility of RTCA/DO-178B and the insight necessary for a smooth certification process. We also present several pressure points that further illustrate the complexity of certification dynamics and offer insight on how they are viewed by the FAA.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
This paper explores the flexibility provided and constraints imposed by DO-178B. We then apply this understanding to the most effective means to analyze a transition effort: the gap analysis.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division; Ron Rubbico, Co-CEO
This paper introduces the concepts surrounding product line development and the associated product line architectures (PLAs), and describes the practices that have evolved to develop and maintain them.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division; Rob Firmin, Vice President
This paper presents insight into what constitutes the best software team, the effects and pitfalls associated with software process improvement efforts, and the pros and cons of all the staffing options available.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
This paper details a seven-step formal reuse analysis and implementation approach. Rigorously following these steps will allow you to lower development risk, increase ROI, and help ensure successful, profitable software development. This paper is a companion paper to Reuse and DO-178B Certified Software, which defines reuse, discusses reuse drivers and typical reuse strategies, details the various types of reuse from a certifiability perspective, and introduces the seven-step formal reuse analysis and implementation approach...
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
This paper explores the ramifications of key elements of the FAA’s Advisory Circular (AC) 29 MG 15 (Airworthiness Approval of Rotorcraft Health Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMSs). This includes: end-to-end criticality assessments, special consideration for COTS ground equipment and software, credit validation for monitoring techniques, algorithms, parameters and rejection criteria, intervention actions associated with HUMS monitoring data, and certification mitigation actions to lower the criticality levels (and costs) of all or part of the HUMS system...
Author: Kevin Platt, Principal Software Engineer
This paper presents techniques that may be leveraged to produce fast, high-quality graphics on low-resolution displays. The memory implications and tradeoffs associated with these techniques are also discussed. The paper then describes antialiasing algorithms for various graphics elements, a weighted area sampling approach for pre-computing antialiased lookup tables near the edges and endpoints of lines, and a supersampling approach is discussed for quickly rendering rotated bitmaps...
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
This paper, from a certifiability perspective, defines reuse, discusses reuse drivers and typical reuse scenarios, and details the various types of reuse. In addition, a brief overview of a reuse analysis and implementation approach will be presented...
Author: Vince Dovydaitis, Engineering Director
In this paper we discuss a hybrid approach that employs OO technology for requirements analysis and software design, but uses a traditional structured language, C, for implementation. By integrating the two into a single process, we are able to derive the benefits of OO technology while avoiding the less deterministic behavior of current OO implementation technology...
