Dr. Gera Weiss's group, in cooperation with Israel Aerospace Industries, won a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority for building a prototype of an on-board satellite control software based on BPjs, a software library for executing and verifying behavioral programs.
The grant funds research for creating a new type of on-board satellite software. This software runs on a satellite, making sure it is safe and functioning, while also performing its tasks (when possible). It's a mission critical software whose failures can be very expensive. This is why, currently, these systems are very simple and limited, and are using old technology that has already proved itself in space flights (a.k.a "system heritage").
We proposed building this type of system using a novel programming paradigm called "behavioral programming" (BP), a variant of scenario-based programming. Under BP, developers create complex systems by writing simple scenarios. These scenarios are quite often aligned with system requirements. The scenarios are combined by a runtime system that ensure that the overall behavior of the system complies with each of the scenarios.
This project is an application of BPjs, a library developed by Dr. Weiss's group for writing general BP system, running and verifying them.
The grant is an applicative research grant by the Israel Innovation Authority (http://www.matimop.org.il);
the industrial partner is Israel Aerospace Industries.
links:
Guides and tutorials: http://bpjs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Source code: https://github.com/bThink-BGU/BPjs
