B a c kg r o u n d
Software engineering
Creating software to keep naval systems always-on Imagine a system that, once turned on, will stay on for the rest of its life. Neither hardware failures nor code glitches can bring it down. At Thales, chief software architect René van Hees is putting his shoulders to the wheel to make this dream a reality. Nieke Roos
Credit: Thales
“C
ompanies like Tesla have set a new standard in software development. With a mere update over the air, they’re able to cut 6 meters off their cars’ braking distance at 100 km/h. That’s really something – we’re talking about millions of vehicles that have to remain safe to drive,” says René van Hees from Thales. “Who’d have thought five years ago that we’d be changing the functionality of our critical systems on the fly?” Chief software architect Van Hees is pushing hard to adopt a similar approach for naval systems. “We’re becoming much more software-intensive as well, with software playing an increasingly important role in our radars. New features are more and more enabled by software, while the hardware remains more or less the same. We’re heading towards a future where, once we’ve deployed a system on a ship, we’ll be adding functionality exclusively through software updates.”
Design for change
To get to that future, there are still some choppy waters to navigate. “For one, it means that we need to drastically increase the frequency with which we deploy new software versions to our systems in the field,” clarifies Van Hees. “Instead of do30
3
ing a big bang every six months or so, we need to move to very frequent, very small, very local updates. Within our software development department, we’re already integrating continuously, ie adding new
features to our software baseline every day. We’re looking to roll this out to the system level and eventually to the customer.” The main challenge is to keep the systems qualified at all times. After a system has
