Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Safety-critical systems in general and avionics software in particular, are applications that must comply with very stringent safety and real-time requirements. These applications require dependability and availability of their underlying platform embodied by a real-time operating system (RTOS). On the one hand, an RTOS supporting avionics software is required to comply with DO-178C which specifies the guidelines for developing airborne software depending on their assurance level. On the other hand, the RTOS must guarantee the availability of the resources required by the different applications that share the hardware platform, and thus must comply with ARINC-653 which specifies these requirements in a standardized manner. Hence, designing and implementing an RTOS supporting avionics software is costly and requires significant efforts. The cost and the efforts can be more important when the RTOS components need to be reusable and customizable, and custom evidence has to be provided to support certification. In this context, Avionics industry are looking for opportunities provided by model-driven technologies to make their development process more effective while still ensuring the safety of the software. However, producing safety-critical software using these new technologies still poses great challenges within the software industry.In this project, we want to leverage model-driven techniques to build an integrated approach that supports avionics software industry in specifying and collecting requirements and test evidence needed for safety-critical software in general, and for and RTOS product line in particular. The expected results are methods and tools that support model-based development, requirements specification, test automation, product line development and configuration management. These methods and tools will improve the productivity of the industrial partner and strengthen its position in the development of avionics software.