An approach for supporting temporal partitioning and software reuse in integrated modular avionics

The integrated modular avionics (IMA) approach can achieve lower overall hardware costs and reduced level of spares by getting multiple applications that have traditionally been implemented using separate, federated units to share hardware resources. However, the IMA approach also brings new challenges that did not exist in the federated setup. Avoiding unwanted dependencies among applications and managing the reuse of legacy code tops the list of challenges. This paper describes a two-layer software architecture, which enables the integration of multiple applications while maintaining strong spatial and temporal partitioning among application modules. In addition, the architecture allows the reusability of existent software modules by enabling the integration of applications written for different real-time operating systems.