Pan-European aircraft manufacturer Airbus is working on open source development tools for building mission critical systems. The project, Topcased (Toolkit in Open source for Critical Applications & Systems Development), started last May. The software is built on top of Eclipse, IBM's open source development tool.
Airbus aims to create a complete set of tools for the entire development process. It should be used for deciding the system specifications as well as aid in the implementation in hardware and software. The suite is planned to include software development utilities such as version control and change management.
"This could solve our current cost and implementation problems with other system development tools", says Gérard Ladier, in an interview published in December by the German IT news website Heise. Ladier is head of software engineering at Airbus' department for Avionic & Simulation Products Software. He is one of the keynote speakers at the "Open source meets business" conference in Nürnberg, later this month.
A number of companies and universities are involved in the development of Topcased, such as Automotive specialist Siemens VDO, and satellite manufacturer Eads Astrium. Ladier expects Topcased to be useful for more than aircraft manufacturing. "Apart from developing software, Topcased can be used to design hardware and complete systems such as aeroplanes, satellites and cars. We are convinced it can be used in other industries as well, for the manufacturing of medical systems or for systems of power stations."
Topcased is sponsored by the French government, through the project Isaure (Ingénierie des Systèmes embarqués Aéronautiques, de l'automobile, des Radiocommunications et de l'Espace). The software is hosted on servers at one of France's top engineering schools, Enseeiht (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Electrotechnique, d'Electronique, d'Informatique, d'Hydraulique et des Télécommunications) in Toulouse.
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Further information:
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Airbus is banking on open source (in English)
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Airbus: Systementwicklung mit Open Source (in German only)