Verocel to develop safety computer for Wide Area Augmentation System

WESTFORD, Mass., 27 June 2012. Verocel Inc., an independent software verification company, has received a $6.2 million single-source contract from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to develop the next-generation safety computer for use in the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). The safety computer will be compliant with RTCA/DO-178B1 and RTCA/DO-2542 to Level B. Verocel will design, construct and verify a new safety computer, including infrastructure software, against the safety computer item specification. Verocel also will assist the FAA in the migration and verification efforts for the WAAS application software hosted on the WAAS safety computer. Verocel has teamed with the Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Systems Group to provide the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware components that comprise the hardware platform for the WAAS safety computer. WAAS is an air navigation aid designed to improve the Global Positioning System (GPS), with the goal of augmenting its accuracy, integrity, and availability. WAAS is intended to enable aircraft to rely on GPS for all phases of flight, including precision approaches to any airport within its coverage area.

WAAS uses a network of ground-based reference stations to measure variations in the GPS satellites' signals in the western hemisphere. Measurements from the reference stations are routed to master stations and send the correction messages to geostationary WAAS satellites. Those satellites broadcast the correction messages back to Earth, where WAAS-enabled GPS receivers use the corrections while computing their positions to improve accuracy.

The new safety computers will become part of the WAAS operational baseline; replacing the existing safety computers and providing the resource capacity necessary to perform the safety computer functions allocated in the WAAS architecture, now and in the future. Verocel has prior experience in developing the certification materials for the existing WAAS safety computer, and is also the sole developer of DO-178B certification packages for the operating system (Wind River VxWorks) currently used in WAAS.