A Model-Based Approach To Configure and Reconfigure Avionics Systems

International audienceAircraft manufacturers have been moving toward the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) approach to reduce the number of dedicated boxes in the aircraft. Standards such as as DO178B or ARINC 653 must be followed during design, configuration or certification of IMA systems. Productivity and costs must also be improved while preserving conformance to standards. For instance, development process of avionics systems involves several system representations and representation transformations are done manually. Moreover, the complexity of new generation of safety-critical systems has also increased the complexity of their development. The authors present their component-based approach which relies on an appropriate modeling language (AADL) combined with modeling patterns to represent, configure and deploy an IMA system. It reduces costs by detecting errors earlier and prevents specifications revisions. Their code generator reduces memory footprint and improves code coverage. One last benefit is a possible automatic certification