Connecting commercial computers to avionics systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present two case studies identified for new aircraft generations in which bidirectional communications are carried between onboard and off-board computers. These two case studies deal respectively with flight parameter calculation and enhanced maintenance operations for future aircraft. We emphasize the safety and security challenges in such communications, and propose a safe architecture allowing the connection of commercial computers to avionics systems, without altering any embedded software component behavior.