A novel approach for the development and coding of avionics functionalities for IMA architectures

This paper describes the methodology and the tool set developed for the rapid prototyping of avionics functionalities to be carried out on IMA architectures. Peculiarities of the work accomplished are: the use of MATLAB/SIMULINK environment to implement IMA partitions models through an ARINC 653 block set; the definition of a development process to avoid to the application suppliers the implementation constraints of an ARINC 653 real-time operating system (RTOS); the customization of the Embedded Coder, the MATLAB/SIMULINK automatic code generator, in order to automatically generate C code, of an IMA partition model, compliant with ARINC 653 RTOS. Such methodology and related developed tools have been successfully tested through hardware in the loop (HIL) simulations of a guide, navigation and control (GNC) application executed on IMA hardware (HW) with Wind River VxWorks 653 RTOS.