Qualitative comparison of aerospace standards: an objective approach

Aerospace development processes are regulated by hardware, software or system-level standards. These standards describe the phases of the life-cycle, and the techniques that guarantee or assess the safety of systems and components. Standards are mostly written independently one from the others, and despite major similarities, they also include several distinctions which force companies to apply different expertise, training, personnel and procedures for each of them. This increases the difficulty in adopting new or different standards, ultimately resulting in increased costs. This paper investigates the differences between relevant aerospace standards, namely, the standards investigated include ARP4754A/4761, DO-178B/C, DO-254, ED-153, FAA HBK006A, Galileo Software Standard (GSWS) and the ECSS series, through comparison of lifecycle and major requirements. Evidence is given of main commonalities between the standards, but also of several, non-negligible specificities, what make it more challenging to define a unique development process, and set of activities and competences required to achieve the standards compliance.