Open modular computing platforms in space — Learning from other industrial domains

Abstract

The goal of the Open Modular Avionics Architecture for Space Applications (OMAC4S) initiative started by Airbus, Fraunhofer FOKUS, STI, SYSGO and TTTech is to outline a solution that helps to contribute to the obsolesence problem of avionivs hardware as well as to reduce complexity and costs for hardware/software significantly. During the past four decades it could be observed that the software complexity has grown continuously by a factor of two every two years. In the early 70's the amount of software was in the order of a few thousands lines of code while today's mission have to deal with more than 1 million lines of code. It is expected that this trend will continue in the next years. In order to handle this complexity at reasonable costs the productivity in writing software but also for designing the underlaying execution system has to increase significantly. In other domains like automotive and aeronautics this trend is even stronger and innovation cycles are much shorter. Thus, automotive and aeronautics industry have initiated developments like AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR) or Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA). All these initiatives are based on the definition of standards for computing platforms and the interfaces between these platforms. In the industrial automation domain Open Modular Computing Standards like VPX and compactPCI serial have been used successfully over many years now. In this paper we describe how standardization and the usage of already proven technologies from other industrial domains will help to limit the effect of the software development on schedule and costs of satellite projects. Furthermore we describe the main characteristics of the open modular system architecture and its implementation as technology demonstrator. The demonstrator includes several computing nodes from different vendors with different performance figures interconnected via the network. Each node is executing typical applications like attitude, orbit and thermal control, payload data processing etc. on top of a Time and Space Partitioning operating system.