1. The Ariane 5 Launcher Failure
June 4th 1996
Total failure of the Ariane 5 launcher on its maiden flight

2. Ariane 5
A European rocket designed to launch commercial payloads (e.g.communications satellites, etc.) into Earth orbit
Successor to the successful Ariane 4 launchers
Ariane 5 can carry a heavier payload than Ariane 4

3. Launcher failure
Approximately 37 seconds after a successful lift-off, the Ariane 5 launcher lost control.
Incorrect control signals were sent to the engines and these swivelled so that unsustainable stresses were imposed on the rocket.
It started to break up and was destroyed by ground controllers.
The system failure was a direct result of a software failure. However, it was symptomatic of a more general systems failure.
Software fault management on the Ariane5 launcher was clearly faulty!

4. The problem
The attitude and trajectory of the rocket are measured by a computer-based inertial reference system. This transmits commands to the engines to maintain attitude and direction.
The software failed and this system and the backup system shut down.
After that, diagnostic commands were transmitted to the engines which interpreted them as real data and which swiveled to an extreme position resulting in unforeseen stresses on the rocket.

5. Software failure
Software failure occurred when an attempt to convert a 64-bit floating point number to a signed 16-bit integer caused the number to overflow.
There was no local exception handler associated with the conversion so the global system exception management facilities were invoked. These shut down the software.
The backup software was a copy and behaved in exactly the same way.

6. Avoidable failure?
The part of software that failed was reused from the Ariane 4 launch vehicle. The computation that resulted in overflow was not supposed to be used by Ariane 5.
Decisions were made
Not to remove the facility as this could introduce new faults;
No overflow exception handler because the processor was heavily loaded. For dependability reasons, it was thought desirable to have some spare processor capacity.

7. Why the operand range in the module was deliberately not protected ?
Avoidable failure?
Why the operand range in the module was deliberately not protected ?
This was because engineering analysis for its use in Ariane 4 had shown the operand would never go out of bounds;
The new range requirement analysis was not transferred to the requirements for the Ariane 5;
Testing was done against wrong requirements.

8. Why not Ariane 4?
The physical characteristics of Ariane 4 (a smaller vehicle) are such that it has a lower initial acceleration and build up of horizontal velocity than Ariane 5.
The value of the variable on Ariane 4 could never reach a level that caused overflow during the launch period.

9. Validation failure
As the facility that failed was not supposed to be required for Ariane 5, there was no requirement associated with it.
As there was no associated requirement, there were no tests of that part of the software and hence no possibility of discovering the problem.
During system testing, simulators of the inertial reference system computers were used. These did not generate the error as there was no requirement!

10. Review failure
The design and code of all software should be reviewed for problems during the development process
The inertial reference system software was not reviewed because it had been used in a previous version;
The review failed to expose the problem. The test coverage would not reveal the problem;
The review failed to appreciate the consequences of system shutdown during a launch.

11. Lessons learned
As well as testing for what the system should do, you may also have to test for what the system should not do (safety verification).
Do not have a default exception handling response which is system shut-down in systems that have no fail-safe state.

12. Lessons learned
In critical computations, always return best effort values even if the absolutely correct values cannot be computed.
Wherever possible, use real equipment and not simulations.
Improve the review process to include external participants and review all assumptions made in the code.

13. Avoidable failure
The designer’s of Ariane 5 made a critical and elementary error.
They designed a system where a single component failure could cause the entire system to fail.
As a general rule, critical systems should always be designed to avoid a single point of failure.

14. Avoidable failure (summary from many authors )
This is more properly classified as a requirements error rather than a programming error. It is not associated with the choice of a particular programming language.
Rigorous formal verification up to the top-level requirements, plus rigorous requirements analysis would have caught the error (model verification).
One can objectively analyze the causal relations in the accident from the data given in the report by applying logic. The approach requires a strong stomach for formal logic.
Use of FORMAL METHODS IN THE SYSTEM DESIGN

15. Examples of bugs in other systems
NASA Space Rover, Intel floating point, etc.
(many reports in “Software Hall of Shame”)
Why so many bugs ?
Because behavior is hard to predict:
US F-16 when flown by Israeli pilots over Dead Sea (altitude < sea level).
Air traffic controller from US to United Kingdom
(It did not assume to deal with problem of 0 degrees longitude along Greenwich Meridian).
Since it is hard to predict, verify full state space by formal methods (instead of testing only typical cases).

16. Additional reading (recommended but not required, see FMUOS Web pages).
The Verified Software Initiative: A Manifesto
Tony Hoare1, Jayadev Misra2, Gary T. Leavens3, and Natarajan Shankar4
April 16, 2007
1Microsoft Research
2Dept. of Computer Science, The Univ. of Texas at Austin
3Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University
4SRI International Computer Science Laboratory