Integrated Modular Avionics - Architecture

Architecture

IMA modularity simplifies the development process of avionics software :

  • As the structure of the modules network is unified, it is mandatory to use a common API to access the hardware and network resources, thus simplifying the hardware and software integration.
  • IMA concept also allows the Application developers to focus on the Application layer, reducing the risk of defaults in the lower-level software layers.
  • As modules often share an extensive part of their hardware and lower-level software architecture, maintenance of the modules is easier than with previous specific architectures.
  • Applications can be reconfigured on spare modules if the primary module that supports them is detected faulty during operations, increasing the overall availability of the avionics functions.

Communication between the modules can use an internal high speed Computer bus, or can share an external network, such as ARINC 429 or ARINC 664.

However, much complexity is added to the systems, which thus require novel design and verification approaches since applications with different criticality levels share hardware and software resources such as CPU and network schedules, memory, inputs and outputs. Partitioning is generally used in order to help segregate mixed-criticality applications and thus ease the verification process.

ARINC 650 and ARINC 651 provide general purpose hardware and software standards used in an IMA architecture. However, parts of the API involved in an IMA network has been standardized, such as:

  • ARINC 653 for the software avionics partitioning constraints to the underlying Real-time operating system (RTOS), and the associated API

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