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The development process of space mission software has to go through numerous steps, from early dimensioning factors at system level (e.g. energy to be consumed by a system, weight of equipment) to the description of low-level software concerns (tasks period, etc.). Most of the time, mission components are taken or derived from existing projects and use well-known best practices: hardware and software concerns are designed from a set of existing components, and are usually well tested and documented. However, teams, with different technical backgrounds, and development approaches, achieve the design. This adds incidental complexity to the design of a common architecture and its verification. Consequently, even if design of new systems is close to existing ones, the recurring key challenge is to reconcile the different views built by these teams, and to ensure that all properties are preserved and validated.

The concept of partitioned kernel, introduced by the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture comes with new challenges (isolation enforcement, partitioning trade-off, etc.) that must be addressed during the design and the implementation of partitioned architectures. However, the development process frequently consists in handwriting code, which makes difficult the analysis of the system. Such a development process does not ease the design of high-integrity systems. Model Based Engineering describes architecture and application requirements with models. Models can be then used to ensure requirements enforcement or produce code, ensuring that requirements are enforced inside the implementation. In this paper, we claim the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) as a valuable candidate to support a Model-Based method for the design and the implementation of ARINC653 systems.