Re: Mission Critical Software Development for Avionic Systems

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

cakmakci@my-deja.com wrote:

> This is probably a very general and a wide-scope question, and
> it might already be a FAQ, but I am looking for some information or
> rather pointers to software development for mission critical avionics
> systems.
>
> - I am particularly interested in hearing experience with COTS ROTS
> for such applications,
>

Often not used more for procedural reasons than technical. I've often been
in situations developing "avionics" (broad category!) where we had to
deliver source for everything to the government - COTS wouldn't do for this
in some cases. Reuse happens, but not frequently since most avionics stuff
ends up with such specialized hardware that its hard to find something like
COTS or ROTS that will fit the need.

>
> - Development processes especially applicable for such system
> software, for instance extra phases you would like to have in
> developing such a software system,
>

Usually you are a *lot* heavier on testing and verification.

>
>  - Concerns for special programming techniques. This is probably a
> naive question but would you have multi-threads in such an application?
> What about optimization? I suspect compact code will improve the
> reliability of such a system.
>

Multithreading is done - or at least I've seen it done on lots of projects.
Optimization is not a bad thing if a) you have confidence in the compiler
and b) you are going through proper verification steps. You're talking
about systems that usually have limited processor time and memory space, so
typically you look for all the ways you can of making things faster and
smaller.

>
> There are other issues I can not think of now. I will appreciate
> any pointers / insight anyone can provide -preferably on the Internet-
> about the subject.

Your questions sound very broad, so its difficult to know if you're getting
a sufficient answer. I don't know that anyone has written a book about
avionics software development - it would be an interesting thing to read.
These things get done in rather large companies when the processes,
techniques, etc. have evolved locally and are sometimes done more by
"tradition" than anything else. Once you've built something that works, you
tend to not want to change the way you did it for fear that something will
go wrong. With avionics, something going wrong is usually viewed as "A Bad
Thing".

I'm afraid I don't know of any books or on-line stuff about this. If you
hear of anything like this, post it because I think others might be
interested. Sounds more like you would want to do an apprenticeship
somewhere in the avionics field or spend some quality time with people from
various companies that do avionics. These things tend to be learned by
experience.

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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