Experience of an efficient and actual MDE process : design and verification of ATC onboard systems

International audienceSince 2002, CS is involved in the conception and the specification of ATC systems for A320, A340, A380, A400M and A350 aircrafts. The ATC module, a ground/onboard communication system, is designed with SDL, a modelling language normalized by the ITU-T and which is described as a UML2-profile, too. The SDL well defined semantic allows to have homogeneous code generators and model simulators: these two technics are used in the process of the ATC projects, giving to the process a very efficient productivity. The automatic code generator generates the C code of the application. The code generator is qualified in accordance to the DO178B requirements (C level). This very strict qualification (development tool qualification) allows to highly reduce the tests effort of the ATC application. Verifications based on tests are realized on the SDL models, through execution simulation. CS uses RTDS, a SDL Z.100 simulator developed by Pragmadev. As well as providing edition and syntax/semantic checking of SDL models, RTDS provides debugging facilities such as breakpoints and step-by-step execution at the model level and a powerful scenarios language which enables to call some directives of the simulator such as MSC generation, internal signals sending, variables printing and so on..