Aerospace systems are increasingly dependent upon software for their functionality, with associated software spanning a wide range of application domains. These include aircraft and spacecraft flight controls, mission computing, weapons management, command and control, surveillance, sensor management and processing, telemetry, and more. Understanding of their unique challenges has driven technology development on many fronts associated both with the products - such as real-time component-based application frameworks, supporting middleware, and algorithms - and the processes and tools by which they are created - such as model-based development and integration, automated code generation, simulations, and desktop test environments. This paper describes a number of these domains and challenges, future directions associated with networking and systems of systems, and technologies facilitating their development within The Boeing Company.

New advances in software component and modeling standards promise to ease the burden of development complexity while improving flexibility and reliability. These solutions raise the level of abstraction from object-oriented classes to coarser components and support the creation and configuration of systems using modeling or other specification standards. This paper outlines the challenges inherent in the original Bold Stroke component model developed in the late 1990's and then discusses an evolved component model that leverages work being done in the Object Management Group (OMG) and in government funded research that addresses these issues in a distributed real-time embedded (DRE) application context.