A niche area where controls, software design, formal specification and verification come together to create better safe aerospace technologies for the future.
Safety in aviation is one of the most important issues of the day. Software at all levels is playing a major role in this area due to more and more automation from flight control to flight management to air traffic control. Increasing pressure on market forces is often leading to quick product releases with critical bugs. In aerospace, avionics software that are mission critical cannot be left to chance. Guidelines by space and aviation agencies provide enough details of required safety properties that can only be guaranteed by precise requirements and proper design using proven tools using formal methods based on firm mathematical foundations. Recent unfortunate events involving airlines and aircrafts globally provide ample evidence of the lack of focus on stringent validation and verification at many levels from design flaws to operational negligence.
Formal methods are predominantly use of appropriate mathematics to make software requirements precise so that one can reason about desired properties of the system. It has been widely used in domains such as VLSI verification (EAD) but is more challenging to apply in cyber physical systems. Bridging the progress in research to practical applications such as avionics and distributed ledger technologies is a niche area where there is a dire need for progress. The only way is via better collaboration between real life applications in industry and state of the art tools coming out of research.