ASSIP Study of Real-Time Safety-Critical Embedded Software-Intensive System Engineering Practices

Modern weapon systems increasingly depend on real-time, safety-critical, embedded (RTSCE) software to achieve their mission objectives. In addition, these systems are experiencing far longer service lives than anticipated at their inception. Army weapon system developers are concerned that this combination of factors renders today's software acquisition and development practices insufficient to address the challenges of these software-intensive systems. To address the concern, the Army Strategic Software Improvement Program tasked the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to assess RTSCE software-intensive systems issues and develop recommendations. The findings of phase one of that study are presented in this report: (1) industry is driving the development of tools for model-based engineering to meet the needs of RTSCE system development, and (2) many opportunities exist for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to gain experience and advance the transition of these tools into DoD programs.