Model-based transition of IMA architecture into configuration data

Abstract

Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) as successor of conventional avionics have many advantages with respect to flexibility, re-usabilty and standardisation. Systems based on IMA consist of a generic hardware platform with a standardised hardware- and software interface and dedicated functions for module management. Due to the many possibilities with respect to hard- and software, creating an IMA architecture that fulfils requirements like redundancy, weight and costs is a comprehensive task. Tools exist that support this design step. On the other hand, if the platform and architecture is chosen, a configuration defines how system applications are integrated on the selected IMA modules and is an important aspect of the IMA development and integration process. Again, tools exist that support this design step for the various IMA module types. The challenge is to consequently re-use information of architecture definitions for configuration engineering. In the present design- and development process, configuration documents are created inefficiently from scratch. This is time-consuming, prone to errors due to misinterpretation and hard to trace and to maintain. In this work, to bridge this gap between early architecting and configuration engineering, formal transformation methods were investigated and developed. These implement an automated transformation of relevant architecture into configuration data and vice versa.