Investigation of a Verification and Validation Tool with a Turbofan Aircraft Engine Application

The development of new capabilities in system intelligence and autonomy will require new means of verification and validation (V&V) to ensure safety and performance requirements are satisfied. As a step towards this goal, CoCoSim, a publicly available V&V tool, is being developed to analyze the validity of user-defined assertions on MATLAB/Simulink models. This paper demonstrates CoCoSim’s capabilities by applying it to C-MAPSS40k, a 40,000 lbf class turbofan engine model developed at NASA for testing new control algorithms. Due to the current limitations of the CoCoSim V&V software, several modifications are made to C-MAPSS40k to achieve compatibility with CoCoSim. Some of these modifications sacrifice fidelity of the original model, but the analysis is still useful even with that limitation. Several safety and performance requirements typical of turbofan engines are identified and constructed into a series of assertions to be tested as part of the V&V framework. Preliminary results for these requirements using C-MAPSS40k’s industry standard turbofan engine controller are presented. While CoCoSim’s capabilities are demonstrated, a truly comprehensive analysis will require further development of the tool.