Shared Data Types for OSRA and TASTE using Modern C++

Abstract

The European Space Agency (ESA) currently provides two tools for the modeling of on­board software: The Assert Set of Tools for Engineering (TASTE) and the On­Board Software Reference Architecture (OSRA). For data type modeling, TASTE uses the standardized Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1), while OSRA provides an internal eCore­based data type representation. Unfortunately, the interworking between the two frameworks lacks a mechanism to exchange data easily without duplicating the data type information. In this work, we present our approach for the exchange of data types and data values between software developed with both tools. We show our additions to the OSRA infrastructure enabling the exchange of data types between OSRA and TASTE based on the same data type descriptions in ASN.1. This includes complementing the OSRA editor with the ability to read and write ASN.1 data type descriptions and to specify the data type encodings in TASTE’s ASN.1 Control Notation. Our previous implementation of the ASN.1 data types in Modern C++ has been extended with a prototypical implementation for the serialization of the data types compatible with TASTE’s ACN encoded types. As for the data types themselves, C++ metaprogramming techniques have been used for the encoder. This allows us to keep the code generators simple and maintainable. Some early results on the exchange of data between OSRA, enabled with our prototype generator, and the TASTE framework with its own ASN.1 compiler are presented and discussed.