A method of Integrated Modular Avionics system configuration data management

Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) system has gradually been applied to the design of the aircraft avionics equipment, and configuration of IMA system is a key technique that makes such system flexible, yet controlled. In this paper, we focus on system configurations of IMA system based on the Arinc653 standard and present a method to classify these configurations. We divide IMA system configurations into two types, the necessary configurations and the configurations. The necessary configurations include core OS (operational system including kernel, BSP and some user defined codes) configuration, application configurations, mid-ware configuration, partition configurations, and the entire module configuration. While the optional configurations include shared data (a memory pool shared by different applications can be used to read or write, or exchange data) configurations, and shared I/O (input and output devices shared by core OS and applications) configurations. In general, there are three roles in developing an IMA system, platform provider, application developer and system integrator. It makes sense that every elements of an IMA system should be configured independently by this system configuration classified method, because of the isolation of different type configurations, and it will be easy to verify and validate the IMA system configuration in different development phases by different roles.