SOFTWARE DEFINED SATELLITE AVIONICS DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT (ARTES AT 4G.046)

Description

The objective of the activity is to produce a software development environment able to configure and build the full avionics software of a satcom using a model-based approachTargeted Improvements:- Reduction of up to 50% of the development time of the avionics system functions,- Enable one avionic platform to support many missions while being fully reconfigurable in flight.Description:The availability of System-on-Chip, powerful micro-controllers and reprogrammable FPGA enables a high-level of flexibility while improving the performance of avionic systems. However, this also multiplies the number of software components and hardware cores and their related interfaces. The development, verification and validation of such complex systems would benefit from a high-level of automation using a model-based approach. The benefits are particularly tangible at the level of interfaces as their automatic generation is not prone to error and thus enables a quicker development.This activity will build a model-based avionic development environment targeting a fully reconfigurable avionics platform for satcom, compliant to the SAVOIR (Space Avionics Open Interface Architecture) functional architecture. After analysing the variability of telecommunication spacecraft in term of data handling and functions, use cases will be identified, i.e. demonstration applications that will be used as support for the validation of the development environment. Then the software components will be selected as well as libraries, that will be supported including at least a Time and Space Partitioning kernel and/or a real-time operating system, a mathematical library, an interpreter, a command-and-control libraryand possibly an Artificial Intelligence model inference engine. A model-based software development environment supporting the modelling of the platform (definition of functions and their deployment on selected devices) will be developed, together with the configuration supporting the identified use cases and the generation of code for both software and hardware components and their integration. The target data handling system devices to be developed will be selected including at least a System-on-Chip, a multi-core processor, a reprogrammable FPGA and a micro-controller. Finally, the selected target system of the model-based development environment will be tested.

Tender Specifics