In 2008, Eurocopter and EADS Test & Services (T&S) jointly started a first project named EASI (EADS Avionic System IDE) in order to demonstrate the benefits for the EADS community of a collaborative development approach using an open architecture for large scale integration test systems. The goal is to obtain a tool or a set of tools able to manage avionic systems containing Eurocopter specificities, while sharing development effort of generic components with a large user community. One of the key components of this project is a multi-purpose real-time component dedicated to test systems based on open standards with an innovative plugin approach and a small C++ kernel as its core. The work mainly consisted in developing modular and open software architecture without sacrificing performance. For instance, an original "zero memory copy" mechanism was developed in order to avoid spending time to transfer data from one plug-in to another one.

-Since 10 years, aerospace industry is facing an unprecedented cycle time reduction driven by high competition between Aircraft manufacturers. To safely sustain such optimizations, virtual test is becoming essential in avionic development cycle. Modern aircraft validation techniques rely heavily on virtual test but integration of this activity in the validation process is still far from being optimal.The goal of this paper is to present a novel approach, in terms of process and technologies, to maximize reuse between virtual testing and more conventional system validation strategies for avionics systems.