A model-driven approach for the development of an IDE for spacecraft on-board software

This paper presents the application of a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach to the aerospace domain. Specifically, it shows the Model-Driven Development (MDD) of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) targeted to the achievement of the so called 'Spacecraft on-board software flexibility'. In fact, the goal of the presented work has been to deploy a full-featured IDE to be used for the development of the 'On-board Command Procedures' (OBCPs). The OBCPs coding is done by using the 'OBCP Definition Language' (ODL), specified by Thales Alenia Space Italy (TASI) on the basis of the requirements stated in the 'Space Engineering: Spacecraft On-board Control Procedures' ECSS standard (ECSS-E-ST-70-01, 16 April 2010). This standard does not impose specific language syntax but provides the guidelines for its specification. By following such guidelines and by exploiting some MDE technologies and tools, such as Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and Xtext, it has been possible to realize an Eclipse-based IDE able to provide to the ODL developer the entire features essential in a modern environment for software development. The considered features include the 'traditional' ones as syntax-highlighting, code-completion, version-control, on-line error-checking, and also 'advanced' ones like syntactic validation, semantic validation, and integrated code compilation. Moreover, by means of the adopted MDE approach, a very large part of the IDE code has been automatically generated starting from the Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) specification of the ODL grammar so allowing for the IDE developers to be more focused on validation issues and on the quality of product than on the coding activity. All this has been obtained by following the paradigm 'coding equals modeling', for which each program represents a behavioral model compliant to the meta-model specified by the grammar of the language itself. The obtained result is a professional product that satisfies all the expected requirements, but this would be just a starting point since the ultimate goal of this work is to contribute to fostering the adoption of MDE approaches in the spacecraft software domain.