Plug-and-Play, an Enabling Technology for Reusable Flight Software

Abstract

As the aerospace industry moves toward the desire for faster, cheaper, and better capabilities, several technologies have emerged that will theoretically aid in achieving these goals. For both spacecraft and aircraft avionics systems, the development and testing of flight software (FSW) is a critical component of both cost and risk, thus positively impacting faster, cheaper, and better in many ways. Over the past three decades, there have been several attempts to reign in the costs of embedded FSW development for aerospace applications, many of them only partially effective. In the 1970’s and 80’s, the standardization of Ada for FSW development was believed to be essential to creating reusable modules, thus reducing the cost and schedule associated with development. In the 1990s, object oriented software was exploited as a means to hide complexity and create reusable class elements. While each of these innovations helped to move toward reusable FSW components, the application of commercial plugand-play (PnP) concepts to the development of embedded FSW for aerospace applications may be able to move the reusability concept another notch forward towards success. More over, capitalizing on peripheral concepts that are associated with PnP, such as a special test interface and eXtended Transducer Electronic Data Sheets (xTEDS) may be able to reduce Assembly, Integration and Test (AI&T) which is always a cost driver in the development of avionics systems.