Floss Software Architecture for Safety Related Systems

【摘要】：The utilization of COTS/FLOSS in the context of safety related systems is of interest for technical as well as economical reasons and there are on-going efforts in industry to find solutions to the challenging question of how to utilize FLOSS in safety applications.Substantial research efforts have reached positive conclusions about utilizing COTS,albeit with restrictions [2],[5],[4].While building on high-complexity software is in principle contended in much of the safety community,we believe that the vast resource of FLOSS components is of such great utility that it is mandatory to investigate there usage in safety related systems and find answers to the open questions.Safety critical system design been focused on minimizing complexity of the system most notably of software components which is also suggested by key standards [61508-37.4.2.6].Here we will argue that while there are grounds to claim that GNU/Linux is conservative with respect to design and technology,it is obviously large and complex,never the less usable if an appropriate solution at the architectural level is designed.These solutions need to address a deeper problem of the safety community,with respect to software: how can we address high software complexity - it is not going to g down in the future and answers need to be found based on sound technical reasoning.