The ProLiCES Approach to Develop Product Lines for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems and its Application to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Domain
Rosana Teresinha Vaccare Braga, Kalinka Regina Lucas Jaquie Castelo Branco, Júnior Onofre Trindade, Paulo César Masiero, Luciano de Oliveira Neris, Martin G. Becker · CLEI electronic journal · 2012
This paper presents ProLiCES, an approach for the development of safety-critical em- bedded applications and its usage to develop a product line for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The motivation of ProLiCES emerged after the development of Tiriba, a fam- ily of small, electric-powered unmanned aircraft. Most software artifacts produced for Tiriba required modifications to be reused in a more complex project, the SARVANT, which has to accommodate several new features that increase the variability of the end products. In the Tiriba project, a methodological approach, named SAFE-CRITES, was defined and used. Special care was taken about software reuse, based on Model Driven Development and automatic code generation. The certification process, based on the DO-178B standard, was also taken into account. ProLiCEs extends SAFE-CRITES to integrate Product Line Engineering into the development process, aiming better software reuse. This extension was done by creating a second parallel path to the process, dealing with the Product Line Domain Engineering. ProLiCES is being currently used in the SARVANT project, which will deliver a much more complex UAV and is estimated to be deployed in two years.