An Open Real Time Test System Approach

In 2008, Eurocopter and EADS Test & Services (T&S) jointly started a first project named EASI (EADS avionic system IDE) in order to demonstrate the benefits for the EADS community of a collaborative development approach using an open architecture for large scale integration test systems. The goal is to obtain a tool or a set of tools able to manage avionic systems containing Eurocopter specificities, while sharing development effort of generic components with a large user community. One of the key components of this project is a multi-purpose real-time component dedicated to test systems based on open standards with an innovative plug-in approach and a small C++ kernel as its core. The work mainly consisted in developing modular and open software architecture without sacrificing performance. For instance, an original ldquozero memory copyrdquo mechanism was developed in order to avoid spending time to transfer data from one plug-in to another one.