Towards safety critical middleware for avionics applications

Two factors influencing the design and development of avionics software are: (1) the cost of verification, validation and certification; (2) migration of avionics functionality from hardware to software, to decrease the weight and power consumption of the avionics. These two factors are inherently at odds. Lowering the development costs of engineering software for safety critical systems, while providing the abstractions necessary to build systems of ever increasing complexity, is key to achieving these two goals. Middleware seems to be the ideal vehicle to reach these goals. Middleware is used to isolate the core application from the underlying distributed system and is constructed using object-oriented techniques. This has the benefit of increasing software reuse and minimizing the code that is verified to various safety criticality levels when the underlying system microprocessor and network are changed. The middleware that meets the criteria placed on safety critical software is faced with many challenges.