Model-based integration of reusable component-based avionics systems - a case study

A flight-tested product line open system software architecture developed under the Boeing Bold Stroke initiative has been previously described and presented (DC. Sharp, 2001). This architecture enables a reusable component-based development process for avionics systems to achieve product goals of improved affordability, quality, and system timeliness. For large-scale systems, one very challenging portion of this process is the integration of common and project specific software components into systems that respect cross-cutting embedded system requirements such as hard and soft real-time deadlines, fault tolerance, and distribution. Significant advances in current approaches would result from an integrated approach to explicit modeling of functional behaviors and coupled physical embedded system properties, analysis of these models to ensure that they meet requirements prior to coding, and automated component configuration code generation. How these challenges, requirements and end-state visions for avionics systems are being developed within the DARPA Model-Based Integration of Embedded Software (MoBIES) program has also been previously described and presented (W. Roll, 2002). This presentation expand on those initial experiment descriptions by delineating the experimental process that was used, by providing examples of the MoBIES-enabled development process in practice, the role of domain-specific models, and by presenting initial qualitative and quantitative results.