The European Component Oriented Architecture (ECOA) is a joint UK-French industry research programme funded by the Ministries of Defence of both countries, which has been executed by a consortium of UK and French industry. The objective of the research is to reduce the cost and timescales for production and modification of complex real-time military software systems, by facilitating software portability and reuse.

The programme defines an open real-time software architecture, agreed between the programme partners, that meets the above objectives. The software architecture is based around a number of key concepts:

• Use of flexible architectural paradigms which provide event and data distribution. These are expected to be key to rapid product upgrades,
• Precise specification of software artefacts, allowing a detailed understanding of functional and non-functional behaviour,
• A better model of distributed real-time behaviour,
• Support for Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and automated code generation to reduce development costs,
• The ability to support various underlying hardware and software platforms, ensuring the approach is able to support legacy and new build,

More information is available on the ECOA website (http://www.ecoa.technology), and outputs from the programme have been published as two Open Standards:

• Def Stan® 00-973 “European Component Oriented Architecture (ECOA®) Collaboration Programme”
• BNAE RG AERO 000-973 “General recommendations, European Component Oriented Architecture – ECOA”

The goals of the presentation are to give a brief overview of ECOA, progress since 2015, its current status and future developments.