The design of integrated modular avionics (IMA) for next-generation aircraft is a significant challenge for the industry in terms of complexity, time-to-market, certification and design effort. Because of those constraints, traditional hand-coding may no longer be a cost-effective option, especially for DO-178C Design Assurance Level (DAL) A Safety-critical applications. While the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) HMI-modeling tools could be a more efficient option, its introduction in an existing environment may result in high risk and effort.
This paper presents the approach for the evaluation of the SCADE Display tool for a primary flight display (PFD) application. In this evaluation, a subset of a previously developed PFD was re-modeled with SCADE Display. The creation of the model served as an evaluation of the usability and the flexibility of the tool. The integration of the generated code on an existing platform was evaluated. To evaluate the impact on platform resources, performance measurements were done against the previously developed code. An analysis of the evaluation is presented, considering the impact on cost, development processes, and future growth potential.
The analysis is particularly oriented on the certification aspects and adaptation to previously developed software. Finally, a post-mortem of the experiment and a list of recommendations to consider before transitioning to an HMI-modeling tool are presented.