Abstract

---

Spacecraft system complexity is reaching a threshold where customary methods of control are not affordable or sufficiently reliable. The conventional approaches to systems and software engineering, based on functional decomposition, fail to scale in the tangled web of interactions encountered in complex spacecraft designs. Furthermore, there is a gap between the requirements on software specified by systems engineers and the implementation of these requirements by software engineers. Software engineers must perform the translation of requirements into software, hoping to accurately capture the systems engineer’s understanding of the system behavior. This gap opens the possibility for misinterpretation of the systems engineer’s intent, leading to software errors. This problem is addressed by a systems engineering methodology called State Analysis, which provides a process for capturing requirements on system and software design in the form of explicit models of system behavior, and defines a state-based architecture for the control system. It provides a common language for systems and software engineers to communicate, and thus bridges the traditional gap between software requirements and software implementation. This tutorial describes how model-based requirements for complex aerospace systems can be developed using State Analysis and how these requirements inform the design of the system software, using representative space examples.

Biography

---

See the March 25 Speaker Meeting for their biographies -- click here.