Software Engineering Institute

This conference paper was presented at the Embedded Real-Time Software and Systems Conference (ERTS2010) in May 2010.

Aerospace industry is experiencing exponential growth in the size and complexity of onboard software. It is also seeing a significant increase in errors and rework of that software. All of those factors contribute to greater cost; the current development process is reaching the limit of affordability of building safe aircraft. An international consortium of aerospace companies with government participation has initiated the System Architecture Virtual Integration (SAVI) program, whose goal is to achieve an affordable solution through a paradigm shift of "integrate then build." A key concept of this paradigm shift is an architecture-centric approach to analysis of virtually integrated system models with respect to multiple operational quality attributes such as performance, safety, and reliability. By doing so early and throughout the life cycle at different levels of fidelity, system-level faults are discovered earlier in the life cycle—reducing risk, cost, and development time. The first phase of this program demonstrated the feasibility of this new development process through a proof-of-concept demonstration and a return-on-investment analysis, which are the topics of this paper.