An adaptive middleware approach for fault-tolerant avionic systems

The distributed nature of avionic systems is hidden by the system architecture, containing a middleware which abstracts the communication and the system management. To introduce scalability and modifiability in future fault-tolerant avionic systems, adaptive mechanisms have to replace the still common manual configuration and parameterization of the middleware. This requires a fundamentally new middleware approach, which is presented in this paper. Adaptivity refers to the autonomous adaption during the initial middleware configuration and has to take domain specific requirements into account, e.g. deterministic communication paths. This is why known concepts from congeneric domains cannot be transferred directly, e.g. PnP from computer science. The publish/subscribe communication paradigm (pub/sub paradigm), with its inherent loose-coupling property serves the ability to interconnect an arbitrary unconfigured system autonomously. The concept of the pub/sub paradigm is applied to the adaptive communication middleware. Alongside the conceptual consideration, the concept is validated on a laboratory demonstrator. The results are promising and the adaptive middleware approach aims to push future avionic systems further towards adaptivity. Further validations should iteratively close the gap towards authorized avionics hardware and for aerospace certified protocols.