Name of Group | 4.02 Application Support Services Working Group |
Area | Spacecraft Onboard Interface Services Area (SOIS) |
Chairperson | Jonathan Wilmot |
Chairperson E-Mail Address | Jonathan.J.Wilmot@nasa.gov |
Chairperson Agency | NASA (GSFC) |
Deputy Chairperson | Richard Melvin |
Deputy Chairperson E-Mail Address | Richard.Melvin@scisys.co.uk |
Deputy Chairperson Agency | UK Space Agency |
Mailing List | sois-app@mailman.ccsds.org |
Scope of Activity | The standard services that are addressed by this working group are those that have been identified during previous CCSDS SOIF activities as being common requirements in all spacecraft missions, and providing the maximum benefit for flight software development and exchange of data between on-board software and hardware components. Furthermore, it is explicitly recognized that interoperability and cross support capabilities need to be provided throughout the project lifecycle, not just during operations, and particularly during application development; integration, and testing. It has also been recongnized that potential users of the SOIS standards may have existing software architectures and/or frameworks that provide those services but with very different implementations. To achieve the benefits to interoperability, cross support, and full lifecycle application development, SOIS is developing interface definition standards that support mapping of interfaces both within a software architecture and between different software architectures.
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Rationale for Activity | The Application Support Services Working Group defines standard services that are provided to onboard software applications. These services isolate the flight software from the underlying hardware details and thereby increase the portability and reuse potential of the flight software. Furthermore, the service access points constitute cross-support interfaces. Defining these services and interfaces using a standard machine readable interface definition language retains the benefits to interoperability, cross support, and full lifecycle application development while allowing domain specific and optimized implementations to be used. |
Goals | It is the overall goal of the SOIS area to produce machine readable device and software component interface specification standard(s) that can be widely adopted and included with spacecraft devices, software components, and science instruments enabling the rapid integration of those components into systems. This would lower the cost of space systems, and enable device and software component interoperability across agencies and industry.
The specific goals of this Working Group are to:
1) document the concepts of onboard communication architectures for applications and devices, including plug-and-play modes of operations, showing the interfaces needed for inter-agency cross support and interoperability, and showing clearly the relationship between the onboard application services and other CCSDS standards;
2) produce machine-readable interface definition schema(s) supporting data exchange, command, and acquisition services. that enable onboard applications to command and acquire data from onboard devices and/or software components.
3) produce guides and a dictionary of terms in support of goals 1 and 2 above
4) gather and incorporate feedback from agencies and industry on applicability of the standards
5) develop and execute approaches to gain wide adoption and infuse the capabilities in missions
6) develop and document software tools to demonstrate application of the standard(s) to existing and future mission systems
7) Work with other Working Groups and BOFs to ensure alignment with the overall CCSDS architecture and other CCSDS areas
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Survey of Similar Standards Efforts Undertaken in
Other Bodies and elsewhere in CCSDS | |
Patent Licensing Applicability for Future Standards | None known |
Technical Risk Mitigation Strategy | The WG requires members who have expertise in full life cycle software and avionics development and systems engineering. The WG intends to recuit members who have that expertise and consult other experts as needed.
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Management Risk Mitigation Strategy | The Working group addresses several topics within the domain of spacecraft software and avionics. Maintaining the schedule requires members with expertise in those topics and continuous support of Agencies in making them available. |
