RTI Connext Micro - Safety-Critical Edition

Standards-based integration for high-assurance applications

RTI Connext Micro - Safety-Critical Edition is the first commercial, standards-based integration solution for high-assurance applications.

Safety-Critical Edition provides a high performance, application-layer messaging infrastructure that enables easy integration between distributed components of avionics systems, including sensors, actuators, displays and ground-control stations. By abstracting out low-level networking and communication details and providing a loosely-coupled integration framework, Safety-Critical Edition reduces software complexity and minimizes the amount of application code that has to be created. This accelerates integration and eases certification and long-term maintenance.

Safety-Critical Edition is offered in conjunction with the RTI Safety-Critical Architecture Assessment and RTI's engineering and certification services. Software can be tailored to your specific requirements, easing both development and certification.

Developers of avionics systems have traditionally had to create, maintain and certify their own inter-application and inter-processor communication middleware. This was required to satisfy demanding real-time performance requirements, stringent resource constraints, certification processes and to support specialized operating systems and hardware platforms. By providing a commercial, high level and standards compliant alternative to in-house development, RTI significantly reduces the cost and risk associated with safety-critical software development, maintenance and certification.

Highlights

• Designed to meet safety certification standards
• Small code size: approximately 130 kilobytes (x86 processors), 20,000 lines of code
• Deterministic memory utilization with no dynamic allocation after startup
• Based on DDS and RTPS standards for loose coupling and network centricity
• Interoperable with the RTI Connext DDS and Connext Messaging
• C language application programming interfaces
• Runs over UDP/IP (can be ported to other transports)
• Supports Linux, Solaris and VxWorks operating systems; portable to other safety-critical operating systems such as INTEGRITY and LynxOS (contact RTI for the latest availability)

Standards-Based Interfaces and Interoperability

Connext Micro - Safety-Critical Edition provides programming interfaces based on the Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems standard (DDS). It also supports the DDS standard's Real-Time Publish-Subscribe (RTPS) wire interoperability protocol.

Because they share standard interfaces, applications written to RTI Connext DDS and Connext Messaging can be transitioned to Safety-Critical Edition with minimal effort. Additionally, the wire protocol standard provides run-time interoperability between Safety-Critical Edition, Connext DDS and Connext Messaging. This allows developers to create distributed applications with a combination of non-embedded, embedded and high-assurance components.

Certifiability

Safety-Critical Edition is certifiable as a component of a complete system undergoing certification to RTCA/DO-178B (EUROCAE ED-12B). RTI will support your certification efforts by providing tests to verify all requirements, removing unused features from the source code, and otherwise adapting the software to your specific requirements. In addition, RTI will provide the necessary certification artifacts, including software development, verification, and configuration management plans and software requirements, design and code standards.

Safety-Critical Edition is all well-suited to certification other high assurance standards such the Common Criteria for IT Security (ISO/IEC 15408).