Design and analysis of a scalable kernel for health management of aerospace structures

Monitoring the usage and health of aerospace structures is vital for aviation safety. Towards this end, we have been developing HUMS distributed architectures. In this paper, we describe a key component of the distributed architectures, the HUMS kernel. The kernel offers the functionality needed to build dynamic and robust monitoring systems that are otherwise not offered by a COTS operating system. It achieves its functionality using five modules: the lifecycle services, the relationship services, the naming services, the monitoring and relocation services, and the buffering services. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we describe the functionality of the kernel in terms of the services it offers to the layers above it. Second, we discuss several design issues of the kernel components. Finally, we analyze the kernel design in terms of its scalability.