Application of SOA in Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are having a widespread use in enterprise computing applications, being Web services the most common implementation. The use of SOA has also been proposed for embedded systems, although very little could be found in the literature on the use of SOA for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems. This paper discusses the use of SOA for the development of this class of systems. Safety-critical embedded systems have specific requirements such as high reliability and real time response, making the use of SOA more challenging than for standard applications. To make concepts clear, a case study on Avionics for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is presented. This is a complex application based on a reference model proposed by the authors. SOA shows to be a promising approach to implement parts of this reference model, especially in what concerns the missions played by the aircraft.