Architectural Design Patterns for Flight Software

Abstract

Software design patterns are best practice solutions to common software design problems. When they are properly applied, software design patterns can greatly improve the quality of software architectures. However, applying design patterns in practice can be difficult since design pattern descriptions are domain and platform independent. Leveraging the benefits of design patterns is particularly important in the space flight software (FSW) domain because better designs are needed to help reduce the number of in flight software related anomalies. In order to address the aforementioned problems, this paper presents software architectural design patterns for space flight software. This paper describes how architectural design pattern templates can be used to build common features of FSW architectures. The FSW architectures produced can be validated for functional and performance correctness.