Improving Fault-Tolerance of IMA using Safe Dynamic Reconfiguration

Kurzfassung

IMA is a central element of modern aircraft. It enables vendors to develop individual software and hardware compo- nents mostly independently from each other and integrate them using standardized interfaces, thereby reducing costs and shortening development cycles. Ensuring safety and fault-tolerance in systems of increasing complexity continues to present challenges to system integrators, requiring redundant deployments of many components. The software components are usually executed using a hypervisor based on ARINC 653 APEX services that provide the safety barriers necessary to ensure a deterministic runtime behavior. We present an approach that allows us to reduce the number of redundant partition deployments and improve fault-tolerance by exploiting these standardized interfaces to allow for safe run-time reconfiguration. We show how location-independence of APEX partitions can be achieved using a set of networked message routers that facilitate the communication between partitions without violating their functional real-time constraints or requiring changes to the partitions themselves.