Requirements and Concept for a Self-organizing Plug&Fly Avionics Platform

Today’s avionics platforms are statically configured and certified. Significant effort reduction would be possible if avionics components were self-configuring. Moreover, a dynamic state monitoring and adaptation would enable increased reliability and resource reduction. In addition, a self-organized redundant instantiation of software and system management mechanisms would simplify system development and integration. We name such a self-organizing platform Plug&Fly Avionics (PAFA). The research project PAFA-ONE is carried out with the goals to demonstrate the technical feasibility of PAFA and to derive a potential roadmap to a safe and certified use of PAFA. As an avionics platform, PAFA must follow the requirements-driven development process of ARP 4754. With this paper we define 11 high-level and 38 low-level requirements for a PAFA platform, in such a way that the requirements do not prescribe a solution, are technology- independent and are in line with major avionics’ regulations, such as DO-178. One challenge is that an avionics platform on its own cannot be certified. We respond to this challenge by adopting the incremental acceptance strategy used for Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) as described in DO-297. From the requirements we derive a concept that allows self-organization properties on IMA technology. Partitions are assigned such that complex algorithms for self-organization can reside in a partition with a low Design Assurance Level (DAL). Moreover, a virtual qualification authority partition is presented that mimics qualification tasks during runtime and can prevent that all configurations have to be validated a priori.