Automated Component Configuration in Safety-Critical Domains

Embedded systems development has enjoyed the success of product family technology for a number of years. However, the same success has not been present in the world of safety-critical embedded systems. These systems are developed using processes that fall under a great deal of scrutiny and justification, and automated tools to manage product family configurations will not be easy to accept in this type of process unless they exhibit some specific characteristics such as user control over processing and explicit traceability of processing steps. We propose an implementation framework for tools that are more amenable to this type of development process, and illustrate this framework with an application that configures fault-accommodation components for engine control software.