Promoting Avionic Tests System as Productivity Enablers: The EASI Case Study

The present paper discusses the strategic evolution of avionics tests systems at Eurocopter requested by virtualization turn. Until now considered as a necessary evil in the global avionics product lifecycle, tests systems are taking the path to be promoted as key productivity enablers. Industry competitiveness pushes avionics actors to revisit and strengthen their Verification & Validation capabilities. To satisfy more and more demanding Time to Market constraints while being strongly innovative, product lifecycle can no longer be apprehended as a series of light inheritance knowledge operations in a delivery perspective. Therefore next Eurocopter's tests systems shall be both designed as an I/O manager and as a model integrator supporting: system concepts validation, knowledge capitalization, models reusing and inheritance between lifecycle steps. This massive turn impacts test system department which role will move to more component integration oriented expertise covering the whole product lifecycle. Only critical parts will remain Eurocopter internal, the other parts shall be open source ones or delegated to third parties. This major change is the baseline of the EASI (EADS Avionic System Ide) Project. EASI is introduced in the present paper to illustrate the near virtualization impact at Eurocopter.