Commercial off-the-shelf real-time operating systems in aviation applications

Software professionals have pursued the reuse model established in the hardware arena for using COTS hardware components when building a system. Software designers have not been as effective in establishing their own reuse for COTS software components. Commercially available real-time operating systems (RTOS) are suitable as reuse component. One of the more critical activities for using a RTOS available as COTS is to define a good set of Configuration Data that allow tailoring a COTS RTOS to our specific application. The success depends of how is customized in a particular target. Up today this activity has been error prone due the absence of support tools. We have developed a graphical tool, which allow using ARINC 653 (a RTOS used in airborne embedded software). By using this approach an optimal tuning of a particular target can be done in less time and less effort.