A Model-Based Toolset for Supporting Rapid Integration and Verification of Spacecraft Electronics

Recent trends in small spacecraft design seek to leverage the principles of modularity and component-level decoupling to facilitate rapid system integration. In this paper, we examine a tool-based approach to support the design and verification of rapidly integrated small spacecraft systems. Most existing approaches to rapid systems integration support device interfacing and integration at runtime, at the expense of added system hardware and software to perform configuration management. Often, rapidly integrated systems need system configuration facilities only once, when all devices are “plugged in.” Once all the devices have been discovered and integrated, the logic that performs these activities is no longer needed. In addition to the overhead imposed by configuration management, self-verification is not permitted by a completely dynamic system, since there is no capability of determining dynamically what the “correct” configuration should be. We propose an approach based on the use of domain specific visual modeling to represent the system electronics, and automatic program synthesis to generate both the middleware to glue the system together, as well as a software-based self-test to validate the rapidly integrated system