Design Method for Integrated Modular Avionics System Architecture

In this paper, we survey the works related to the system architecture of avionics and extract characteristics from the related works. On the basis of the investigation, we propose an integrated modular avionics (IMA) architecture that can be used for current avionic upgrades and future avionic developments based on the IMA Core system. To verify the feasibility of the proposed IMA architecture, we have developed the prototype of the IMA Core system that consists of both the common hardware module and the IMA software. It was verified that the developed prototype with the common hardware module contributes to the improvement of maintainability because it can save the time and expenses for the development and can reduce the number of types of hardware modules when compared with Federated architecture. It was also confirmed that the developed prototype can save not only overall system weight, size, and power consumption but also the number of hardware types because the IMA software can support the integrated processing where the single processing hardware module can process multiple software applications.