Modeling advanced modular avionics architectures for early real-time performance analysis

Behavioral simulation including the impact of architectural choices is required to help the designer in reducing design ambiguities and errors of embedded complex systems which are distributed (for performance and reliability requirements) and present hard real-time features (time critical avionics functions), as early in the product life cycle as possible. This paper presents a modeling and simulation approach for real-time performance analysis of advanced modular avionics architectures that must operate with hard real-time constraints. Proposed models allow the design capture at increased level of abstraction, including the description of avionics real-time software architecture, target modular hardware architecture made up of available components, and clustering and mapping of the software architecture on the hardware architecture. These models have been coupled with a commercially available discrete event simulation environment that allows real-time performance evaluation.