Commercial and Open Source Software in Rotorcraft Avionics Systems

A component-based software architecture for avionics systems is described. It is based on open commercial standards and utilizes an application framework to encourage the development of standardized components, which can help to shorten the development cycle and reduce development costs. The framework also isolates application software from the operating system and hardware, minimizing the impact of future hardware changes. The architecture leverages evolving open-source distributed computing infrastructure technology to provide fault tolerant features and also allows building systems that can scale up across multiple processors, or down to a single processor as processor power grows. Commercial and open-source operating system technology is leveraged to provide a way to combine applications of different safety criticality levels in the same processor, which can help to reduce system re-qualification costs. The framework's software products are evaluated to determine their suitability in avionics systems.