Articles 1 - 7
Avionics
Making software FACE-conformant and fully portable: Coding guidance for Ada - Story
March 15, 2021The FACE [Future Airborne Capability Environment] approach to reducing life cycle costs for the military is based on reusing software components across different platforms and airborne systems. The FACE Technical Standard addresses this issue through a reference architecture and data model, well-defined interfaces, and widely used underlying industry standards (IDL, Posix, ARINC-653).
Avionics
Avionics
Portable, reliable, and efficient concurrency: Ravenscar Ada tasking and the FACE safety profiles - Story
November 28, 2018
Airborne systems that need a small footprint or must comply with an industry assurance standard such as DO-178B [1] or DO-178C [2] are sensitive to size and complexity costs in the run-time support libraries. To answer these needs, the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE?) Technical Standard [4] has designated the Ravenscar subset of the Ada programming language?s tasking features as one of the acceptable concurrency approaches for a software component that must satisfy safety and/or security assurance requirements.
Cyber
Choosing the optimal software solution for long-life unmanned systems - Story
April 24, 2018
Defense platforms are expected to perform over a long operational life that can span several decades. Developing high-reliability, safety-critical software that is built to last requires comprehensive tools from trusted industry partners. Robust software-development solutions can help engineers design and develop new long-life unmanned systems and can enable upgrade of systems on currently fielded unmanned platforms to extend their life cycle.
Avionics
Toward safety and security in FACE components: High assurance with portability - Story
March 15, 2018
The FACE [Future Airborne Capability Environment] approach is a joint government-industry software standard and business strategy for acquisition of affordable software systems that promotes innovation and rapid integration of portable capabilities across global defense programs. FACE - originally avionics-focused only, but has now broadened to encompass a wide catalog of applications for use across the entire spectrum of real-time systems - does not directly address issues of quality or fitness for purpose. Because these traits are obviously important in practice, the natural question for component developers is how to meet both the explicit FACE objective of portability and any domain-specific requirements for software reliability, safety, and security. Part of the answer is to choose appropriate software-development technologies and language(s).
Avionics
DO-332, the Liskov Substitution Principle, and local type consistency ramp up DO-178 certification - Story
March 12, 2013
DO-332, the DO-178C standard's supplement on Object-Oriented Technology (OOT) and related techniques, analyzes the issues raised by object orientation in safety-critical software and supplies new guidance to deal with OOT's vulnerabilities. An important new objective of DO-332 is "Local Type Consistency Verification," which exploits a type theory result known as "the Liskov Substitution Principle" and helps address some of the key certification challenges raised by OOT's dynamic flexibility.
Avionics
Trusting the tools: An agile approach to tool qualification for DO-178C - Story
March 07, 2012
The new avionics software safety standard DO-178C, along with its supplemental Software Tool Qualification Considerations (DO-330), has clarified and expanded the tool qualification guidance provided in DO-178B. The challenge of maintaining qualification-ready tools throughout a system?s evolution can be expedited through an approach based on agile development principles.
Articles 1 - 7
