On the use of Ada tasking in the building of satellite control software

An increasing proportion of the critical control activities performed on board of modern satellite systems is nowadays being implemented in software. The resulting software systems have thus to accommodate a large spectrum of processing requirements, which shows an increasing demand for event-driven activities. Hence, process-oriented preemptive priority-based scheduling is most suited for use in such systems. This paper contends that the recent advances in the domain of hard real-time make Ada tasking particularly apt for it. This paper shows that, although a variety of reasons exist to date for not using any of the Ada tasking in critical applications, most of such reasons may be defeated by educated design and efficient implementations