Advancing open standards in Integrated Modular Avionics: An industry analysis

Abstract

Existing industry open standards for integrated modular avionics (IMA) such as ARINC 653 are quite limited in scope when considering the IMA platform as a whole. Open standards bring many benefits to the IMA platform, as they enforce commonality, enable portability, promote re-use, and harness industry-wide best practices, just to name a few. At present, there exists an opportunity to advance the use of open standards in IMA systems, thereby extending the aforementioned benefits to all stakeholders in the industry. In this essay, a notional generic open IMA architecture based on the society of automotive engineers (SAE) generic open architecture (GOA) framework is conceived for the purpose of exploring open standards opportunities in IMA. An industry impact analysis reflective of realizing opportunities identified by the generic open IMA architecture is subsequently presented, where contemporary methods such as Michael Porter's "five forces of competition" and Brandenburger and Nalebuff's concept of "complementers" are applied.