Knowledge-driven software development for Distributed Aircraft Fuel Management

The development of avionics software demands more and more human intervention. The software development process is rather highly expensive and risky since it must undergo certification. Automation of such a process can reduce errors and human interaction. Automated development tools usually deal with automatic code generation. These approaches are actually based on pre-defined fixed rules and policies to automatically generate software code which still demands considerable hand-coded software. This paper presents a self-directed development process that is able to make decisions by its own to generate software code. The automated decision-making process relies on a reasoner, and an ontological database that captures development skills from human developers as well as the dynamic configurations and capabilities of the system under development. The knowledge captured enables highlevel reasoning to automatically generate the control software code. A case study based on the development of Embedded Control Software (ECS) for Distributed Aircraft Fuel Management (DAFM) is presented. Details of the reasoning ontology to develop ECS, and experimental results from ECS for DAFM automatically generated are presented.