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Most current generation avionics systems are based on a federated architecture, where an electronic device runs a single software module or application that collaborates with other devices through a network. This architecture makes the software development process very simple, but the hardware system becomes very complicated and it is difficult to resolve issues of size, weight, and power efficiently. An integrated architecture can address the size, weight, and power issues and provide better software reusability, testability, and reliability by means of partitioning. Partitioning provides a framework that can transparently integrate several real‐time applications on the same computing device, allowing the isolation of the execution environment in terms of resources and faults. Several studies on partitioning software platforms have been reported; however, to the best of our knowledge, extensive comparison and analysis of design and implementation alternatives have not been conducted owing to the extreme complexity of their implementation and measurement. In this paper, we present three design alternatives for partitioning at the user, kernel, and virtual machine monitor levels, which are compared quantitatively. In particular, we target the worldwide standard software platform for avionics systems, that is, Aeronautical Radio, Incorporated Specification 653 (ARINC 653). Overall, our study provides valuable design references and demonstrates the characteristics of design alternatives. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

As the number of electronic components of avionics systems is significantly increasing, it is desirable to run several avionics software on a single computing device. In such system, providing a seamless way to integrate separate applications on a computing device is a very critical issue as the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) concept addresses. In this context, the ARINC 653 standard defines resource partitioning of avionics application software. The virtualization technology has very high potential of providing an optimal implementation of the partition concept. In this paper, we study supports for full virtualization based ARINC 653 partitioning. The supports include extension of XML-based configuration file format and hierarchical scheduler for temporal partitioning. We show that our implementation can support well-known VMMs, such as VirtualBox and VMware and present basic performance numbers.

In embedded systems, such as aerospace crafts and automobiles, it is desirable to run several real-time applications of different criticality on a single computing board by exploiting temporal partitioning. The applications, however, are usually developed by different organizations independently. Thus providing a seamless way to integrate separate applications on a control board guaranteeing real-time requirements and criticality is a very important issue. In this paper, we suggest a partition model with a mechanism that can decide each partition's period and execution time automatically preserving its criticality level. We show that the suggestion can i) prevent a task in a low-criticality partition preempting a task in a high-criticality partition (i.e., criticality inversion) and ii) provide high system throughput. 1

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