Aircraft cabin systems, especially cabin management systems (CMS) have to cope with frequent cabin changes during their lifecycle. This includes not only layout rearrangements and technological upgrades during the service, but also extensive CMS customizations and product variations before aircraft delivery. Therefore it is inevitable for the CMS to be highly changeable and offer an easy and agile change process. Today's CMS solutions face this challenge with configurable system architectures. Although such architectures offer a vast change domain, they usually come with time consuming and error prone change processes.
This paper introduces an adaptive avionics software architecture that enables the CMS to cope with cabin changes highly automatically and with minimal human interactions. The adaptation is performed during an on ground organization phase, in which system changes are detected and evaluated by the CMS itself. Consequently the CMS instantiates and adapts the software within hardware modules and establishes the system overall communication.
The concept of adaptive CMS is based on an open service oriented software architecture with built in services, which abstract the communication, redundancy, fault-tolerance and the supervision of the system operation modes during the life-cycle. The software architecture contains also organization services, which enable the CMS to detect the system changes and adapt itself accordingly.
