Task design and verification testing for certification of avionics equipment

As avionics systems play an increasingly more pervasive role in airline cockpit operations, the ease-of-use of these systems to perform airline mission tasks, increasingly impacts the costs of pilot training, and the efficiency and safety margins of cockpit operations. Airworthiness regulations and regulatory certification processes for avionics equipment do not explicitly call for the design and verification testing of the pilot-avionics interaction. Without explicit design of the pilot-avionics interaction, avionics equipment is fielded with user-interfaces that require pilots to learn unnecessarily long sequences of memorized actions during training. These memorized action sequences then have to be recalled during line operations, even after not being used for several months. The number and complexity of the memorized action sequences directly contribute to airline training costs, and impact the efficiency and safety margins of airline cockpit operations. This paper proposes the inclusion of a task design document (TDD) in the DO-178B avionics equipment certification process to explicitly design pilot-avionics interaction. The TDD specifies how the operator interacts with the automation to perform airline mission tasks. The structure and content of a task design document (TDD) is described with example specifications. The implications of this proposal on the DO-178B process are also discussed.