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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.

The current state of the art of in-the-loop testing of avionics embedded systems is very heterogeneous, with many different in-house test languages, and it is unable to respond to the evolving needs of the stakeholders in this field. To lay the foundations of more homogeneous test development solutions, this paper offers an overview and analysis of the features of six different test languages. Best practices and pitfalls to avoid are discussed. The analysis focuses on four major categories of features: test organization, abstraction of and access to the system under test interfaces, test language instructions, and time management. Four of the test languages in the sample set are currently employed in the field of avionics. The other two, used, respectively, in the automotive and telecommunications industries, have been chosen for comparison purposes. The paper reports the key findings of the analysis and presents the resulting ongoing research work.

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