A new approach for distributed computing in avionics systems

Historically, a typical avionics system architecture has been designed as a federated architecture of black-boxes with well-defined functions and implemented on fully dedicated computers. The new Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture relies on an architecture more similar to conventional computers, where several general-purpose processors are connected through a bus and all the Inputs/Outputs (I/O) come from the I/O units (like Remote Interface Units, RIUs) through the bus to the processors. This architecture imposes a heavy traffic on data networks, which cannot be satisfied by traditional buses such as the MIL-STD-1553, but still requires determinism, which cannot be provided by general-purpose networks. In this paper, we describe the basics of IMA and the communication network designed for the new Airbus 380. The preliminary evaluation results show the feasibility of the IMA approach.