Towards Automatic Reconfiguration of Aviation Software Systems

The development of embedded systems is currently experiencing a fundamental shift towards integrating more and more heterogeneous system building blocks into ever more complex composite systems. The aviation industry is especially hit by this development and suffers from a number of additional challenges such as long system life-times that are often significantly longer than those of individual microprocessors and other embedded devices. Since aviation software development is still often driven by the ongoing integration of new hardware it is about time to focus on a better componentization of avionic software systems. The new software architecture proposed in this paper is not only more maintainable than existing systems, it also allows for a semi-automatic integration of new hardware devices based on an automatic configuration and adaptation mechanism. As a result, airplane manufactures will be able to significantly reduce the (down-) times required to integrate new software and therewith hardware into the cabin of an airliner.