TITLE:
Deploying Safety-Critical Applications on Complex Avionics Hardware Architectures
AUTHORS:
Robert Hilbrich, Laurent Dieudonné
KEYWORDS:
Avionics; Systems Engineering; Software Deployment; Software Architecture; Safety-Critical Systems
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.6 No.5,
May
15,
2013
ABSTRACT:
Aviation electronics (avionics) are
sophisticated and distributed systems aboard an airplane. The complexity of
these systems is constantly growing as an increasing amount of functionalities
is realized in software. Thanks to the performance increase, a hardware unit must no
longer be dedicated to a single system function. Multicore processors for example facilitate this trend as they are
offering an increased system performance in a small power envelope. In avionics,
several system functions could now be integrated on a single hardware unit, if all
safety requirements are still satisfied. This approach allows for further
optimizations of the system architecture and substantial reductions of the
space, weight and power (SWaP) footprint, and thus increases the transportation
capacity. However, the complexity found in current safety-critical systems
requires an automated software deployment process in order to tap this
potential for further SWaP reductions. This article used a realistic flight
control system as an example to present a new model-based methodology to automate the software
deployment process. This methodology is based on the correctness-by-construction
principle and is implemented as part of a systems engineering toolset.
Furthermore, metrics and optimization criteria are presented which further help
in the automatic assessment and refinement of a generated deployment. A
discussion regarding
a tighter integration of this approach in the entire avionics systems
engineering workflow concludes this article.