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In the aerospace industry, as the modern avionics systems became more and more complex, the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture has been proposed as a replacement of the federated architecture, in order to offer better solutions on SWaP constraints (Size, Weigh and Power). However, the development process of IMA avionics systems is much more difficult. This paper aims to propose to the aerospace industry a set of time-effective and cost-effective solutions for the integration and functional validation of IMA systems. Based on MBE methodology, which is considered as an interesting solution for the IMA systems development [8], this paper proposes a design flow, that integrates three steps of refinement, for the configuration and the validation of IMA platforms. In the first step of the design flow, the modeling language AADL is used to describe the IMA architecture.

The Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture has been a crucial concern for the aerospace industry in developing more complex systems, while seeking to reduce space, weight and power (SWaP), as well as development, certification and production time. From a software perspective, that objective pushes developers to migrate toward safety critical space and time partitioning environment. However, mainstream commercial real-time operating systems (RTOS) offering such partitioning can be restrictive in early development due to very high licensing costs. That situation is even more striking when considering that low-cost alternatives could instead be used for system modeling and early simulation before acquisition of a target platform. This paper reviews existing low-cost and open-source development environments to propose a novel design flow. The proposed methodology starts with model-based analysis in the AADL modeling language.