Software Engineering for Aerospace: State of the Art

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter discusses the state-of-the-art of software engineering for aerospace. To be successful, software engineering for aerospace must take into account the fact that aerospace systems need to meet a variety of standards and high safety requirements, and therefore, the development of aerospace systems emphasizes verification, validation, certification, and testing. This chapter discusses the complexity of software development along with the software engineering process currently employed by leading aerospace organizations such as NASA, ESA, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. Their software development projects apply a spiral-based methodology where the emphasis is on verification. Methods, techniques, and architectural approaches for aerospace are also discussed. A new class of autonomous aerospace systems (such as UAV and robotic space-exploration systems) is currently emerging to incorporate features like integrated health management, self-monitoring and on-board decision making. The lack of proper, yet dedicated, software engineering for autonomous aerospace systems is the reason for many inherent problems related to requirements, modeling, and implementation. Requirements engineering for autonomous systems appears to be a wide open research area with only a limited number of approaches yet considered.KeywordsRequirement EngineeringUnmanned Aerial VehicleIntelligent AgentService Orient ArchitectureRequirement EngineerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.