The domain-specific software architecture of avionics testing system

A Domain-Specific Software Architecture (DSSA) could bring a large-scale reuse of software in the construction of application systems. Although there are several typical Avionics Testing Systems (ATSs) all over the world, the DSSA of ATS (DSSAATS) has never been put forward. ATS, as a software-intensive system, is such a system that can effectively be used to implement automatic, realtime, close-loop and non-invasive system testing for avionics. Based on the research about current advanced ATSs, a DSSAATS is put forward and described systematically with UML and "4+1" Views Model. Different architectural views of DSSAATS could consist with each other and in particular the DSSAATS is divided into two system-level components in design view: one is the Real-time Component and the other is the Non-real-time Component. Configuration Tool Class is the key class for the Non-real-time Component and Model Class, Real-time Variable Class, Scheduler Class for the Real-time Component. The Scheduler Class supports a scheduling policy called SBRMS (Segment-Based Rate Monotonic Scheduling), a scheduling policy that introduces the concepts of Segment and Sub-segment, not only stable but able to ensure the data dependency between tasks, hence especially suitable to the real-time systems such as ATSs. Dedicating to different requirements, several ATSs were constructed rapidly on the basis of DSSAATS and used successfully in the system testing of several avionics, finding a lot of sequential, logical and interface faults, through which both the correctness and the effectiveness of the DSSAATS are validated.