Fault-tolerant systems are traditionally divided into fault containment regions and custom logic is added to ensure the effects of a fault within a containment region would not propagate to the other regions. This technique may not be applicable in a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) based system. While COTS technology is attractive due to its low cost, they are not developed with the same level ...

Among the COTS applications in the X2000 architecture for deep-space missions, the use of commercial bus standards is the highest-payoff COTS application since a bus interface has a global impact and enabling effect on system cost and capability, respectively. While COTS bus standards enable significant cost reductions, it is a great challenge for us to deliver a highly-reliable long-term survi...

The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software products as components of large-scale systems has become more and more pervasive. One of the interesting questions that has arisen is "Can you build secure applications using insecure components?" We have been investigating ways to protect data that is shared between two or more independent, insecure applications. Our initial attempts to accom...

With the increasing complexity of real-time embedded applications and the availability of Commercial-Off-TheShelf (COTS) multi-cores, time-predictable execution on these platforms has become a necessity. However, there are several challenges to achieving this predictability, primarily arising due to hardware resources shared between the cores (memory controllers, caches and shared interconnect)...

COTS products affect development strategies and tactics, but not all CBS development efforts are equal. Based on our experiences with 20 large government and industry CBS projects assessed during our development of the COCOTS estimation model, and our hands-on experience with 52 small e-services CBS projects within USC’s graduate level software engineering course, we have identified four distin...

Today, ubiquitous mobile devices have not only arrived but entered the safety critical domain. There, systems are about to be controlled where human health or even human life is put at risk. For example, in automation systems first ideas surface to control parts of the system via a COTS smartphone. Another example is the idea to control the autonomous parking function of a car via a COTS smartp...

This chapter faces the problem of identifying a set of parameters characterizing COTS products. The need for such a characterization derives from the problem to identify and select among many available products the ones which are appropriate for a specific software system. The characterization should allow to foresee the integration and maintenance effort in target systems developed with a COTS...

Component-based software has become a mainstream practice as organizations attempt to streamline application development tasks. These applications invariably contain third-party Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) systems with black box functionality. When integrated applications require security certification, COTS components, even if individually certified, may introduce vulnerabilities into the ...

Government policies on the acquisition of software-intensive systems have recently undergone a significant shift in emphasis toward the use of existing commercial products. Some Requests for Proposals (RFPs) now include a mandate concerning the amount of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) products that must be included. This interest in COTS products is based on a number of factors, not least of w...

Government policies on the acquisition of software-intensive systems have recently undergone a significant shift in emphasis toward the use of existing commercial products. Some Requests for Proposals (RFPs) now include a mandate concerning the amount of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) products that must be included. This interest in COTS products is based on a number of factors, not least of w...