A feasibility study for ARINC 653 based operational flight program development

Abstract

The aircraft manufacturers are constantly driving to reduce manufacturing lead times and cost at the same time as the product complexity increases and technology continues to change. As avionics systems have evolved, particularly over the past two or three decades, the level of functional integration has increased dramatically. Integrated modular avionics (IMA) is a solution that allows the aviation industry to manage their avionics complexity. IMA defines an integrated system architecture that preserves the fault containment and ‘separation of concerns’ properties of the federated architectures, where independent functional chains share a common computing resource. In software side, the air transport industry has developed ARINC 653 specification as a standardized real time operating system (RTOS) interface definition for IMA. It allows hosting multiple applications of different software levels with partitions on the same hardware in the context of IMA architecture. The primary components of the ARINC 653 are core and applications software. This paper describes a study that assessed the feasibility of developing an ARINC 653 based operational flight program (OFP) prototype and will provide valuable lessons learned through OFP development. The OFP architecture consists of two distinct modules: a core that interfaces and monitors the hardware and provides a standard and common environment for software applications; and an application module that performs the avionics functions. The prototype OFP is being integrated with the FA-50 simulator at the avionics laboratory of Korea Aerospace Industries.