A Component Model for On-board Software Applications

Component-based development has become more common news than exotic novelty in mainstream industry. Its adoption has accrued high facilitation potential for software reuse and better organization of the product. Surprisingly however, component-oriented approaches have fared far worse in the domain of high-integrity real-time systems. One of the fundamental reasons of this difficulty stems from the larger incidence of extra-functional concerns than in conventional industry and the more stringent demands on the ultimate product quality. It is not intrinsic however that component-based software engineering cannot just make it in that domain. Hence adopting it may be an effort worth pursuing. In this paper we present the main conceptual and methodological steps taken by an initiative of the European Space Agency aimed at the creation of a component model suited for the development of on-board software.