Enabling Software Technologies for Critical COTS-based Spacecraft Systems

In this position article, we motivate the necessity to introduce three software methods in spacecraft computing platforms in order to enable to use COTS components: SIHFT, mixed-criticality, and probabilistic timing analysis. We investigate the benefits and the drawbacks of these techniques, especially in terms of safety, by also analyzing the standards to identify the current limitations that do not allow such techniques to be used. Finally, we recap current and future works, highlighting possible changes to standards.