Testing Satellite on-board Software - A Model Based Approach

Today, testing on-board software consumes approx. 30% of the effort for a software project. Improvements in this area will help to save a significant amount of time and money. As discussed in the research community, model based approaches are a very promising solution to save costs while increasing software quality at the same time. Failure Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) is a significant part of today's flight software. Approx. 30% of the test effort is spent on this functionality. The basis for the FDIR is the failure mode effect analysis (FMEA). Therefore, the approach we present hereafter starts from a “traditional” text based FMEA document.