Evolving avionics systems from federated to distributed architectures

Abstract

Typical avionics systems today are structured in a federated architecture. Upgrading such systems has proven unwieldy and expensive, even as the advance of technology and increased functional requirements have made upgrades more imperative. Of particular concern is the systemic integration required for information superiority through multi-source data fusion. To improve this situation, the Maritime Avionics Subsystems and Technology Scalable Open Architecture Project (MAST SOAP) has designed a distributed avionics architecture. It is characterized by general-purpose hardware resources linked by an extensible communications network, an Object Request Broker infrastructure, and commercially available components with open interface standards. This paper outlines our approach to legacy system upgrades in the context of an open distributed architecture, presents the lessons we have learned that are applicable to such a system evolution, and discusses the performance implications involved in the use of such an architecture for an avionics system.