Reducing certification granularity to increase adaptability of avionics software

A strong certification process is required to insure the safety of airplanes, and more specifically the robustness of avionics applications. To implement this process, the development of avionics software must follow long and costly procedures. Most of these procedures have to be reexecuted each time the software is modified. In this paper, we propose a framework to reduce the cost and time impact of a software modification. With this new approach, the piece of software likely to change is isolated from the rest of the application, so it can be certified independently. This helps the system integrator to adapt an avionics application to the specificities of the target airplane, without the need for a new certification of the application.