Supporting ARINC 653-based Dynamic Reconfiguration

As the software for avionics becomes more complex, the challenge to provide the required reliability and safety mechanisms becomes also more complex. Embracing the ARINC 650 and 653 standards to provide a means to embark several systems into a single hardware cabinet opens the door to the development of even more elaborated software avionics systems, by overcoming the space constraints once found in this kind of system. Nevertheless, ARINC 653 exhibits also some limitations regarding fault redundancy management, especially when handling redundant applications with spares that back up other applications. In this paper, a framework to support fault tolerance and reconfiguration in avionics systems under the umbrella of ARINC 653 standard is described. This paper represents part of the results of the research projects carried out during the last two years by Eurocopter Espana in collaboration with the University of Castilla-La Mancha.