Strategy of the Complexity of the Avionics Hardware Architectures

Abstract

The aviation electronics (avionics) in modern aircrafts realizes more and more safety-critical functions for pilot assistance, comfort and maintenance. Due to the complexity of the avionics hardware architectures and the variety of non-functional requirements affecting a deployment, its construction is an intricate and costly task. The deployment of software components onto hardware architectures is a decisive part in the engineering of a software-intensive and safety-critical system. The deployment affects the cost and performance of the entire system while being subject to a variety of safety requirements. On an abstract level, a deployment is bound by hard constraints determining valid solutions and soft optimization criteria determining desired solutions. We showed how the deployment could be automated by modeling and formalizing hard and soft constraints for complex avionics systems.