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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.

This paper presents an Electronic System-Level (ESL) methodology and framework for the system specification, design space exploration, performance analysis, and hardware/software implementation of aerospace electronic systems subject to Quality of Results (QoR) constraints such as execution time, communication rate, technology, as well as Size, Weight and Power (SWaP). In particular, we show how SWaP constraints could be converted into bounds on the target hardware platform, how several potential architectures could be devised for the system, how each potential architecture and mapping could be evaluated for performance, hardware resource usage and power taking into account the impact of Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR), and how a selected architecture could be exported as a hardware/software Register-Transfer Level (RTL) implementation.