Supporting the evolution of distributed, non-stop, mission and safety critical systems
Charles W. McKay, Colin Atkinson · MADOC (University of Mannheim) · 1995
Jn coming years embedded systems which are distributed, non-stop and "mission and safety critical" (MASC) are likely to assume increasing importance.The construction, operation and maintenance of this class of system presents a unique blend of problems which many traditional tools and techniques, targeted to just one problem area, cannot currently address.This paper provides an overview of a promising, model-based framework for supporting such systems that has been developed as part of NASA's MISSION project.Based on well-established research advances in computing, the MIS-SION approach provides a domain-specihc, life-cycle support framework encompassing three separate environments: host, integration and target.Although the individual elements ofthe framev/ork are not ali new, their synergistic packaging within the MISSION project is believed to be unique.This paper focuses upon the systems-level support for applications executing in the target environment.