Software product line engineering of space flight software

This paper presents a practical solution to a real life industrial problem in the unmanned space flight software (FSW) domain using software product lines and software architectural design patterns. In the FSW domain, there exists a significant amount of variability in the required capabilities. For example, some FSW have a significant amount of hardware to control and operate in a nearly autonomous fashion. In contrast, other FSW have a small amount of hardware to control and rely heavily of commanding from the ground station to operate the spacecraft. The underlying architecture and component interactions needed for the different FSWs are quite different. This amount of architectural variability makes it difficult to develop a SPL architecture that covers the all possible variability in the FSW domain. Therefore, this paper presents a practical solution to this real world problem that leverages software product line concepts and software architectural design patterns.