Mini seminar - Self-organizing safety-critical avionics systems

Avionics is short for "aviation electronics". Today's aerospace vehicles rely on hundreds of computers and functions are majorly realized in software. Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) systems are state-of-the-art in civil aviation. IMA systems provide shared computing and interface resources for many system functions on board of the aircraft, e.g. flight control. Many of the functions are safety-critical, which means a malfunction or unavailability causes fatalities. IMA systems have been shown to be reliable and resource saving. However, their planning, integration and qualification is a major challenge today. A self-organizing avionics system overcomes shortcomings by establishing, maintaining and proving a safe state of operation on its own, i.e. system components are detected automatically; the necessary degree of redundancy and fault detection is instantiated; and functions and signals are allocated to the available resources optimally. Moreover, self-organization can be leveraged to increase safety and decrease necessary computing resources. The talk will outline the major challenges of self-organizing safety-critical avionics, i.e. certification, topology discovery, knowledge management and self-qualification. For each challenge, the talk will elaborate the state-of-the art and show research contributions of the speaker. Finally, a lab test rig for a plug&fly avionics system is shown in its current state and future work is outlined.

The seminar will be also be broadcast on zoom.