The CORDET Project
This is the web site of the project on Component Oriented Development Techniques or CORDET. The goal of the CORDET Project is the definition of a generic architecture for on-board satellite software applications. The project is funded under ESA contract 20463/06/NL/JD.
This web site gives access to the results of the CORDET Project and, in particular, to the software building blocks of the CORDET Generic Architecture. A set of functional building blocks are made available as free and open software by P&P Software GmbH. The University of Padua provides guidance on the development of non-functional part of the Generic Architecture. A prototype is developed by Thales-Alenia Space.
Contents
Objectives
The general objective of the CORDET study is the definition of a generic architecture for on-board satellite applications.
The term generic architecture is used to designate a set of reusable and adaptable software assets to support the instantiation of systems within a certain target domain. In the CORDET project, a generic architecture consists of a system family, to model the non-functional aspects of systems in the architecture's target domain, and a set of software frameworks, to model their functional aspects.
The terms system family and software frameworks are used to designate two kinds of product families. A product family is a set of applications or systems that can be built from a pool of shared assets. A system family is a kind of product family where the 'product' to be built using the reusable assets provided by the family is the architectural infrastructure (the 'middleware') of a complex system. A software framework is a kind of product family where the 'product' to be built is a software application and the shared assets are software components embedded within an architecture optimized for a certain domain.
The generic architecture to be defined in this study is called the CORDET Generic Architecture. The product families which constitute the CORDET Generic Architecture are called the CORDET Product Families.
Against this background, the more specific objectives of the CORDET study are:
- To define a methodology for the development of the CORDET Generic Architecture and, by implication, for product family-based development activities at both system- and software-level for satellite on-board applications.
- To identify and to define at the level of their functional and non-functional interfaces the product families that constitute the CORDET Generic Architecture.
- To demonstrate the proposed methodology and the proposed architecture by instantiating a subset of its product families to build an end-to-end demonstrator of an on-board system.
- To get feedback from the space community in order to reach as large an agreement as possible on the outputs of the CORDET study.
Industrial Consortium
The CORDET Project is funded by the European Space Agency under ESA Contract 20463/06/NL/JD. The industrial consortium is led by Thales-Alenia Space with P&P Software GmbH of Switzerland, the University of Padua of Italy (group of Prof. T. Vardanega), and GMV of Spain as subcontractors. This project is closely coordinated and integrated with a parallel CORDET project led by Astrium-Toulouse.