Using SOA in Critical-Embedded Systems

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are having a widespread use in enterprise computing applications, being Web services the most common implementation. The use of SOA has also been proposed for embedded systems, although very little could be found in the literature on the use of SOA for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems. This paper discusses the use of SOA for the development of this class of systems. Safety-critical embedded systems have specific requirements such as high reliability and real time response, making the use of SOA more challenging than for standard applications. Furthermore, this paper proposes a new form of segregating the UAV mission from the vehicle itself. In order to separate the mission of the plane the MOSA - Mission Oriented Sensors Array - is proposed, an array of sensors oriented to missions that is plugged into the aircraft so as to leave it totally independent of the payload. The techniques proposed in this paper not only aim to facilitate the development of applications but also allow different tasks to be performed simply switching such sensors and their association with the aircraft.