AdaCore is platinum award winner in product innovation for QGen model-based software development tools
NASHUA, N.H. – Military & Aerospace Electronics and Intelligent Aerospace have recognized AdaCore in New York City as a platinum-level winner in the publications' 2020 Innovators Awards for the company's QGen model-based software development tools.
The QGen model-based development toolsuite includes a qualifiable code generator for the MathWorks Simulink/Stateflow modeling language, which generates C or Ada source code from the model, without human intervention.
The QGen code generator is being qualified by AdaCore and their partner Verocel at tool qualification level one (TQL-1), which is the highest level of qualification recognized by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The fundamental goal of a qualified code generator is to ensure that the software that is auto-generated has identical semantics to the original model, ensuring that any activities performed at the model level through simulation will produce identical behavior on the final target.
The 2020 Military & Aerospace Electronics and Intelligent Aerospace Innovators Awards are to recognize products as solutions to difficult aerospace and defense systems design challenges. The awards are in three tiers: platinum, gold, and silver. The awards were announced on 7 Sept. 2020.
QGen includes a qualifiable code generator for the MathWorks's Simulink/Stateflow modeling language, which generates C or Ada source code from the model, without human intervention.
The QGen code generator is being qualified by AdaCore and their partner Verocel at tool qualification level one (TQL-1), which is the highest level of qualification recognized by the FAA. The fundamental goal of a qualified code generator is to ensure that the software that is auto-generated has identical semantics to the original model, ensuring that any activities performed at the model level through simulation will produce identical behavior on the final target.
This can be a challenge for modeling languages, which are not themselves defined formally. This has meant that part of the TQL-1 process has included a formal definition of an identified safe subset of the Simulink/Stateflow language.
This safe subset was defined and verified by AdaCore and Verocel, and covers modeling features that are important in mission-critical systems, yet leaves out features with difficult-to-define semantics, or hard-to-verify translation to source code. Using a TQL-1 code generator can help reduce the time necessary to examine the generated source code manually.
The AdaCore QGen tool suite includes a model debugger that operates in the target environment, but at the Simulink model level, meaning developers can step through their system at the model level, verifying that states and signal levels match expectations, while delving deeper only into places where unexpected output occurs. This same debugger also enables debugging of hand-written C or Ada code, which might be linked in with the auto-generated code.
Overall, the use of AdaCore's qualified QGen code generator for MathWorks' Simulink/Stateflow modeling language, and the associated model-level verification tools, is a key part of our customers increasing commitment to model-based engineering. QGen is providing our customers with a real advantage by streamlining the verification process while providing additional guarantees of safety in turn for the users of the products developed with QGen.
For more information contact AdaCore online at www.adacore.com.
