Enhanced fault management for future IMA systems

Integrated Modular Avionic (IMA) concepts offer the capability to enhance the reliability and availability of future avionic systems whilst supporting high performance, flexible deployment and affordability. Fault management is the key to achieving many of the projected benefits but involves significant technical risk: design entails complex trade-offs whilst validation of solutions through testing is only practicable for a small proportion of the possible failure set. System modelling as part of requirements definition and design is essential to achieve optimised solutions with low risk. This paper describes a modelling programme initially aimed at exploring the tradeoffs in system architecture and fault management. The approach being taken to extend it to allow for software reliability and fault tolerance is described