The activity aims to define a space profile for an existing commercial avionics modelling language

The model based software engineering consists in expressing the software functional requirements with models. In order to get the requirements right as early as possible, system-software co-engineering is necessary, in this case avionics-software co-engineering, where the software functional models are placed consistently into an avionics model.The avionics model represents the physical architecture on which the software will run (deployment view). It allows to define some key parameters which enters into the definition of system functional and performance properties such as end-to-end response time, accuracy etc. These properties can then be mapped onto the software models and verified at software level by model checking.The avionics architecture model represents roughly a set of boxes (computing nodes such as computers or IMA partitions) connected with busses, plus parameters characterising the avionics elements and used by the software deployment and software verification tools: name of processor, throughput, bandwidth of bus, etc.This model is one essential element contributing to the on-board software reference architecture and supported by the component based approach. The main example of an avionics architectural language is AADL (SAE standard initiated by Honeywell). The main example of the parameters that could be attached to it are the one described in the MAST tool, a schedulability analyzer for distributed system (University of Cantabria). They configure various scheduling policies such as cyclic, pre-emptive, IMA, distributed, etc.The activity includes the definition of a space profile for an existing commercial avionics modelling language- derive the (space specific) requirements for an avionics architecture modelling language- select a commercial tool based on the derived requirements for the language- demonstrate the validity of the tool by means of a pilot application