Fault Tolerant Components for Space Mission Operations

A viable component-ware technology infrastructure is starting to emerge industry-wide. The basis of this infrastructure is a critical mass of the leading platform vendors adopting an object-based distributed computing specification: Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). We propose to leverage emerging distributed object-based distributed computing frameworks, initially CORBA, and advance it by designing a protocols for fault-tolerant space systems. We propose to advance current CORBA technology through the development of two key innovations: 1) run-time (dynamic) or compile-time (static) semantic-based composition and synthesis of reusable software components and 2) the ability to compose fault-tolerant services from groups of components. Object group topologies will enable the deployment of fault-tolerant services based on object replication and migration management. Critical operations will be able to continue in a gracefully degraded fashion if any one copy of a system element fails. The long-range goal of this proposed work is to overcome barriers to building and deploying fault-tolerant systems from verified, reusable software components.Benefits: Significant reductions in time-do-development, cost of system testing and requirements validation will drive the initial market demand for reusable, fault-tolerant object groups. Early adopter markets are mission-critical domains such as DOD analysis and command support, satellite and space control operations, capital market (trading floor) decision support information systems, government and commercial logistics management and medical information systems.|