AdaCore Now a Principal Member of The Open Group FACE™ Consortium

Company increasing its level of membership and participation

NEW YORK & PARIS & ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., April 23, 2019 –The Open Group FACE Consortium Member Meeting – AdaCore, a trusted provider of software development and verification tools for the Ada programming language, is raising its membership level in The Open Group’s Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Consortium from Associate to Principal. This transition exemplifies and reinforces the company’s commitment to the FACE approach, whose objectives are fully in sync with Ada and with AdaCore’s corporate mission and product offerings.

“In raising our membership level to Principal in the FACE Consortium, we will continue to participate actively in the definition of the FACE Technical Standard and ensure Ada’s role in the Safety capability sets,” said Jamie Ayre, Commercial Director at AdaCore. “Customers, and the more general community, can be assured of our commitment to supporting FACE component developers through a number of Ada run-time libraries and tools.”

“We are grateful to AdaCore for upgrading their membership level in The Open Group FACE™ Consortium, and we look forward to their contributions as one of the organizations who provide leadership and direction within our multitude of activities,” said Judy Cerenzia, The Open Group Director, Forum Operations.

Ada is unique in its support for portable, reliable and efficient code, which are also software requirements underlying the FACE approach. The language was designed for programming critical, real-time embedded systems and has a long and successful track record in military / aerospace projects and in other high-assurance domains where safety and/or security are required.

AdaCore has been an active member of The Open Group FACE Consortium since 2012. The company’s contributions include:

• Reviewing the various versions of the FACE Technical Standard and assisting in the definition of the IDL-to-Ada mapping;
• Working towards incorporating Ada 2012 capability set support in future versions of the FACE Technical Standard so that FACE component developers can take advantage of contract-based programming and other useful features;
• Serving as a key member of the Conformance and Operating System Subcommittees to formulate effective policies and procedures for FACE Technical Standard conformance, including operating systems and run-time libraries; and
• Sponsoring FACE Consortium meetings and presenting papers / conducting demos at FACE Technical Interchange Meetings.

AdaCore’s product offerings contribute to the FACE approach in several ways:

• Ada-development environments. AdaCore’s GNAT Pro Ada development environment supports a wide range of native and cross platforms and includes a variety of static and dynamic analysis tools. One of the editions of this product, GNAT Pro Assurance, is especially suited to projects requiring long-term maintenance and/or safety certification based on a specific version of the GNAT Pro technology.
• Run-time libraries. GNAT Pro cross compilers for several target platforms include run-time libraries for the Ada Safety-Extended and Safety-Base & Security capability sets. These libraries are available for RTOSes that have undergone or are planned for FACE conformance, in particular Wind River’s VxWorks 653 and Lynx Software Technologies’ LynxOS-178. The libraries help FACE component developers meet the portability goal underlying the FACE approach while providing the analyzability, predictability and efficiency required in high-assurance real-time avionics systems.
• Capability set enforcement. The GNATcheck coding standard enforcement tool can check compliance with the restrictions defined by the Ada Safety capability sets.
• Supplemental tools. Other AdaCore products that are useful to FACE application developers include the CodePeer advanced static analysis tool for detecting vulnerabilities and other errors in Ada code, the SPARK Pro formal methods-based toolsuite for verifying critical program properties with mathematics-based rigor, and the GNATcoverage dynamic analysis tool for checking source or object code coverage.
• Safety certification. DO-178B/C certification material is available for several run-time libraries, and qualification material is available for a number of GNAT Pro tools.

About AdaCore

Founded in 1994, AdaCore supplies software development and verification tools for mission-critical, safety-critical and security-critical systems. Four flagship products highlight the company’s offerings:

• The GNAT Pro development environment, a complete toolset for designing, implementing, and managing applications that demand high reliability and maintainability. GNAT Pro is available for Ada and also for C and C++.
• The CWE-Compatible CodePeer advanced static analysis tool, an automatic Ada code reviewer and validator that can detect and eliminate errors both during development and retrospectively on existing software. CodePeer can detect a number of the “Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors” in the MITRE Corporation’s Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE).
• The CWE-Compatible SPARK Pro verification environment, a toolset based on formal methods and oriented toward high-assurance systems.
• The QGen model-based development tool suite for safety-critical control systems, providing a qualifiable and customizable code generator and static verifier for a safe subset of Simulink^® and Stateflow^® models, and a model-level debugger.

Over the years customers have used AdaCore products to field and maintain a wide range of critical applications in domains such as commercial and military avionics, automotive, railway, space, defense systems, air traffic management/control, medical devices and financial services. AdaCore has an extensive and growing worldwide customer base; see www.adacore.com/industries/ for further information.

AdaCore products are open source and come with expert online support provided by the developers themselves. The company has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com/

About The Open Group FACE™ Consortium

The Open Group FACE™ Consortium is taking a leadership role in developing open standards for avionics systems of the future. The FACE Consortium was formed as a government and industry partnership to define an open avionics environment for all military airborne platform types. The FACE Approach provides the open avionics standard and business strategy for making military computing operations more robust.

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