Aerospace & Defense Technology - April 2022 - 18

The Future of Managing
Mission-Critical Systems
T
here's no doubt the complexity
of aerospace design systems
is constantly increasing,
driven by new demands on
architecture and next-generation
technologies. As a result, the costs
and time associated with the creation,
certification and deployment
of mission-critical electronics hugely
heighten if the systems are not managed
in a new way.
The established approach of adopting
an RTOS that can be certified in accordance
with functional safety standards
presents several challenges. The development
and maintenance of an RTOS
to meet the demanding objectives of
(for example) FAA DO-178B/C DAL A is
a considerable undertaking, which represents
a significant investment for any
system developer. The fact they are so
complex means they also have substantial
(and suboptimal) footprints. Functional
safety standards should ideally
18
minimize development overhead by
permitting the separation of a software
system into software items with the aim
of placing as little of the system as possible
into the more critical classes.
For many applications, there are now
more optimal solutions from a safety,
security and operational efficiency perspective.
The most successful approach a
company can take is to use an alternative
mechanism to fulfil the kind of sophisticated
multi-tasking requirements traditionally
addressed by an RTOS. The specific
path forward that's being adopted
by many in the industry is harnessing
mixed criticality systems to achieve adequate
separation between software items,
which is vital to the integrity of meeting
functional safety standards.
Reconsidering Your Existing
Approach
If you're reconsidering your approach
to managing mission-critical systems,
www.aerodefensetech.com
you might be wondering what your
timeline should look like and any external
factors playing into that. Two points
come to mind.
First, as of now the FAA IMA(DO-297)
certification process mandates
the use of partitions. Aircraft
manufacturers can opt out of IMA.
However, IMA, in general, poses the
long-term benefit of achieving economy
of scale when certified modular
partitions are re-used.
Second, from a safety perspective, the
VM platform model wins out. With an
increase in multicore processor adoption,
many system architects have been
consolidating the operation of multiple
applications onto single SoCs. The danger
is that as these SoCs share resources
(memory, IO peripherals, etc.), applications
can interfere with others. While
the impact of this for a consumer product
is minimal, it is significant for mission-critical
systems.
Aerospace & Defense Technology, April 2022
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Aerospace & Defense Technology - April 2022

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