Model driven early exploration of IMA execution platform

Abstract

Nowadays the conception of avionics platform follows the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) concept. This concept specifies network architectures, composed of computing modules capable of hosting more than one application that communicates through the AFDX network. Thanks to IMA, the number of modules aboard is reduced, as their footprint in term of space and weight. But the complexity of the design, verification and certification processes for the execution platform (hardware and OS) increases, while time to market tends to decrease. Facing this growing complexity, platform design relies on model-based approaches to assist the refinement of system requirements and to proceed to early analysis. Current model-based approaches focus on software description and approximate hardware components characteristics by set of predefined properties corresponding to a general category of component, and interactions between components in terms of distribution over time. In this paper, we propose a modeling approach allowing describing with different levels of detail an execution platform and simulate it in order to retrieve dynamic performance at early phase of the development process, and test the compliancy between the proposed architecture and a given set of applications. Applications are considered as entry point, and we focus on the response of the platform services and hardware architecture to the applications stimuli. Our method relies on two standardized languages: AADL to model with high level of abstraction the complete platform, and SystemC to refine the description of the execution platform and simulate this latter. In this paper we present our approach, the two languages it relies on, and expose the mapping rules we defined to generate a SystemC model from the execution platform model described in AADL. We also present promising experimental results obtained on an avionic use-case.