Model-based deployment generation for safety-critical avionics systems

To reduce the growth in size, weight and power of avionic electronic systems, the avionics industry tends to integrate more and more functions on less electronic computing units. Particularly, the use of multicore processors seems ineluctable in this domain. These changes, however, bring new challenges regarding, among others, methods and tools to proof safety and timing requirements for new platform architectures. One complex task to be solved during the design phase is the so-called deployment problem, which analyzes possible mappings between software applications and hardware execution units. Without the help of dedicated tools and due to the large number of constraints avionics systems need to fulfill, this problem becomes intractable. In this paper, we employ a model-based development tool, called AutoFOCUS 3, to generate deployment solutions for an industrial case study based on a flight control system with strict requirements regarding safety, timing, storage and communication aspects. We have also customized AutoFOCUS 3 to seek optimized deployment solutions with respect to the number of cores and other hardware resources.