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State-of-the-art avionics systems are standardized, e.g. the computing system of the flying vehicle is composed of pre-defined and pre-qualified modules of a standardized avionics platform. Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) is the most popular representative, but not the only one. Two challenges of standardized avionics platform are system design and configuration. Since the high numbers of functions, modules, and constraints for modern air vehicles, bringing up the optimal system architecture is a difficult job if carried out manually. The subsequent process of creating millions of configuration parameters is time consuming and error prone. Both issues are similar and are, in general, processable by algorithms. Algorithms proved to provide significant support for current system design issues and might be mandatory in future, when avionics become self-organizing and the design and configuration are derived by the platform itself.

Development for the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) platform is complex owing to the variety of equipment, vendors and non-uniform tools. The development should be simplified by a model-based harmonized tool environment by means of an integrated set of tools of different type, origin and purpose. Eclipse's flexible and modular architecture seems adequate as a framework for such a harmonized IMA development environment. This article evaluates how Eclipse could practically be utilized for this purpose. The IMA process and development requirements like concurrency, different process roles, and multiple tools are mapped to the Eclipse framework. In addition, open-source extensions for model-based engineering and application development are integrated in the tools chain. In order to test the performance, openness and compatibility of Eclipse and the tools from the IMA development process, six current and future tools are integrated into a prototype of a common Eclipse instance.