2018-annual-report

Madrid Flight on Chip
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The project Madrid Flight on Chip (MFoC) is a research
and innovation project funded by Comunidad de Madrid.
The goal of the MFoC project is to develop novel techniques
for the development of future-generation aerospace
satellite systems. The project will explore hardware
and software techniques for radically different aerospace
system development in that will enable much more costeffective
satellite missions with lower development time
possible with new-generation System-on-Chip designs,
while maintaining high levels of reliability.
The project will explore the use of modern hardware architectures,
including FPGAs and commercial multi-core to
solve common problems in the target aerospace application
domain. These problems include energy consumption
and resistance to cosmic radiation. The software techniques
will include applications of software engineering
techniques like model-based design and automated code
generation and testing.
The role of the IMDEA Software Institute in the MFoC
project will be the research, adaptation, and technology
transfer of techniques from program analysis, runtime
verification, and automated test generation to the
verification and validation phase of aerospace software
development. Due to the demand for high-reliability of
satellite systems, the development of their software is
very slow and costly. In turn, as projects become more
complex, verification and validation, usually relying on
highly manual techniques, dominate time and overall
cost. In this project, the IMDEA Software Institute will
explore formal and semiformal techniques to improve the
state-of-the-art of verification and validation of the newgeneration
satellite systems.
annual report
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To improve the chances of success, the project will exploit
specific characteristics of the on-board software developed
for satellite missions. This software is to follow very
strict coding rules and patterns. One of the main challenges
will be to tackle automatically generated code
produced using model-based development technologies.
The MFoC consortium includes SENER as the main
aerospace industrial partner and IMDEA Software and
Universidad Carlos III as research partners, with GEN-
ERA, CENTUM, REUSE and MARM being the rest of the
industrial partners.