Supporting ARINC 653-based Dynamic Reconfiguration

As the software for avionics becomes more complex, the challenge to provide the required reliability and safety mechanisms becomes also more complex. Embracing the ARINC 650 and 653 standards to provide a means to embark several systems into a single hardware cabinet opens the door to the development of even more elaborated software avionics systems, by overcoming the space constraints once found in this kind of system. Nevertheless, ARINC 653 exhibits also some limitations regarding fault redundancy management, especially when handling redundant applications with spares that back up other applications. In this paper, a framework to support fault tolerance and reconfiguration in avionics systems under the umbrella of ARINC 653 standard is described. This paper represents part of the results of the research projects carried out during the last two years by Eurocopter Espana in collaboration with the University of Castilla-La Mancha.

I. Introduction

The tendency towards more complex avionics systems in all kinds of aircraft is likely to continue for the predictable future, as digital electronics continue to become more powerful and cost-effective. As system complexity increases, the challenge of achieving the necessary reliability for safety critical systems becomes much more difficult, mainly because system failures will be more common as the number of components increases. The aerospace avionics domain is not exempt from this tendency, as the definition of guidelines, standards, etc for the specification of avionic systems demonstrates. ARINC 650 [2] is one of the most well-known of these standards and describes how avionic systems can be developed applying an Integrated Modular Avionic (IMA) architecture. IMA promotes a specific decomposition of avionic systems in order to deal properly with their inherent complexitv.