Design for Flexible and Scalable Avionics Systems

Large-scale complex embedded systems pose unique problems to developers. The development of these systems is often performed in a concurrent and iterative fashion. This has lead to a great deal of work on developing processes and product technologies to support scalability and flexibility, i.e. managing change. One example of this is the DARPA funded MoBIES project which approaches the problem by allowing the designer to concentrate on the model level. From a real-time systems perspective, one area that needs greater attention is that of task allocation and attribute assignment. The reason is that, whilst a great deal of work has been done on task allocation, it has been targeted at meeting the current set of timing requirements without giving appropriate consideration for the need to manage change