Preferred choice for resource efficiency: Integrated Modular Avionics versus federated avionics

Abstract

Ever since the dawn of the modern avionics era features like economy of weight, power and space; improved reliability; safeguards against the lurking danger of obsolescence; efficient use of available resources such as processing power, interfaces, and memory; and change containment owing to the insertion of advanced systems; have always been imperative. Aircraft avionics architectures can be divided into two broad categories: Federated - based upon the dedicated resource allocation mechanism; and Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) - constructed using a resource sharing mechanism. During the past decade, the IMA has emerged as an alternative to the Federated platform. The contribution of this paper is to draw a comparison between the two architectures and to decide about the preferred one. During the research, 35 different projects carried out on small and medium sized commercial aircraft and fighter aircraft were studied. In all these projects the legacy Federated architecture was replaced by the IMA architecture. The statistical data was quantitatively analyzed using StatPro software. The results show that the migration from Federated to IMA approach brought about improvements in weight, space, and power; total amount of electronic equipment; reliability; and resource utilization.