Applicability of Ada tasking for avionics executives

The author evaluated Ada tasking performance and its suitability for avionics schedulers known as executives by comparing variations of Ada executives written in JOVIAL using the existing Digital Avionics Information System. The system overhead of each model was evaluated during the running of a series of representative application tasks. The study found that Ada tasking had considerably more overhead than its JOVIAL counterpart in order to maintain precise cyclical timing. Another outcome was that several Ada compilers were unable to produce code which could be run on the MIL-STD-1750A computer. This points to the present immaturity of Ada compilers targeted toward embedded aircraft computers and confirms the need to revise standards and develop compilers to provide an efficient run-time for Ada executives.<>