Being critical to the functioning of various essential operations, such as flight control, navigation, flight planning, data analytics, and many more, software plays a major role in the aviation sector’s growing success. However, being a safety-critical sector, the software in the aviation sector goes through rigorous testing and lengthy certification process to ensure they comply with the governing body’s regulations before being deemed safe. Keeping the lengthy and costly certification process in mind, Sandeep Patil, along with his Co-founders, established Samhita Engineering in 2020 with a primary goal to automate the process required for certifying aviation software while ensuring that they are compliant with the guidelines (RTCA DO-178C/EUROCAE ED-12C) set by the governing bodies. Over the years, the firm has glued its focus on developing a unique Product Engine Suite (PES) that can help reduce the efforts required by 40 to 50 percent for certifying software before adding various additional features to it.

In an exclusive interview with CIO Insiders, Sandeep Patil, Founder of Samhita Engineering, shares details about the foundation of the firm and its flagship offerings, the future roadmap envisioned for the journey, and much more.

How has been the growth of the Aerospace Aviation & defense sector in India? What is your opinion on the Engineering Solution industry for the aerospace and defense sector gaining momentum over the years?
While the Aerospace industry has a huge market in the US and Europe, apart from some tier 1 suppliers, we don't have any commercial aircraft

manufacturing companies available in India. Apart from the hardware, the software also plays a critical part in the Avionics industry. Being a safety-critical domain, software development in the avionic sector goes through a set of rigorous validation processes or guidelines introduced by various zonal defense corporations, such as the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), EASA, TCCA, and so on. All these software are then certified and are deemed safe. While those validation processes can be tedious, they are essential for the software certification.

salient features, such as requirement engineering and management, automated test case generation (high-level and low-level test case generation), and simulation support.

The Test Case Generator software tool can reduce around 40 to 50 percent of the efforts required to generate the test cases and scripts based on high level requirements irrespective of the format. We also offer MC/DC test case generator and can generate MC/DC test cases from millions of input conditions within hours. We also offer customized Black box test environment development/setup based on customer and project needs.

More than a technology provider, we are a solution provider. What makes us stand out from the rest of our peers in the market is our requirement engineering solutions, where the process of requirement validation is automated at the first instance of software development, generating testable requirements. Apart from that, we also have different tools to manage requirement versions and configurations.

What is the future roadmap envisioned for Samhita Engineering? Where is it headed for the next five years?
Since the firm's inception, our sole focus has been developing the complete solution. We started the journey with the test case generation tool before adding requirement management and other features, which we received as feedback during our marketing visits. Our immediate plan is to complete the development of the software product suite as soon as possible. The primary goal is to have a one stop solution for the complete software development lifecycle of safety-critical projects. The test case generation module and requirement management module has already been completed, and are market ready. We are also coming up with two additional features as part of the product engine suite, such as problem reporting and review process.

Is the company funded or bootstrapped?
The company is completely bootstrapped. We are now looking at investors to complete the Product Engine Suite and other products faster and make available to market.