AdaCore Technologies for FACE™ Software Developers
Benjamin M. Brosgol & Dudrey Smith
AdaCore is a Principal Member of The Open Group’s Future Airborne Capability EnvironmentTM (FACE) Consortium. We have been actively involved with the FACE effort since 2012, participating in and contributing to both the Technical and Business Working Groups.
Our objective in the FACE Consortium is to help FACE software suppliers meet assurance requirements for reliability, safety, and security while realizing the portability and reusability benefits that come from FACE conformance. Among the languages that are called out in the FACE Technical Standard – C, C++, Ada and Java – the one that best promotes high assurance coupled with code portability is Ada.
As a software tool provider to the Aerospace and Defense community, we offer products that enable and encourage FACE software suppliers to use Ada for their applications. More specifically, AdaCore’s FACE related products include:
- GNAT Pro Ada development environments targeted to RTOSes supplied by FACE Consortium members, such as Wind River’s VxWorks 653 and Lynx Software Technologies’ LynxOS-178;
- Efficient run-time libraries that are distributed with our cross-compilation environments and have been deployed in avionics systems certified at the highest Design Assurance Levels (DALs) of software standards such as DO-178B/C; and
- Static analysis tools including the formal methods-based and CWE-compatible SPARK Pro toolsuite, the CWE-compatible CodePeer deep static analyzer for Ada, and the GNATcheck coding standard verifier for Ada.
This book summarizes AdaCore’s technologies and shows how they can help avionics suppliers develop and verify high-assurance FACE conformant software. The discussion is based on Edition 3.1 of the FACE Technical Standard and applies also to earlier versions.
