Comparitive Analysis of Design Patterns for Aircraft Mission Computer Application

Abstract

Designing of airborne systems is one of the most critical and important area. Latest software and hardware technologies enable us to design and develop start of the art real time system like fighter aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), satellite systems, space shuttles and commercial aircraft etc. The popular concurrency design patterns that can be used for architecture design of real-time software applications have been identified. The suitability of real-time design patterns for airborne software applications, by using a generic avionics platform as an example have been analyzed and proposed. Keeping in view the Integrated Avionics Architecture, the key functions of mission computer were identified and hardware architecture was proposed. For schedubility analysis a task model based on these functions has been created. A comparative analysis of Execution Control patterns including Preemptive Multitasking, Cyclic Executive and Time Slicing patterns has been done and the most suitable pattern has been been identified, which determine the software architecture. The analysis has been carried out using a previously implemented framework that allows modeling, simulations and schedulability analysis for a set of real-time system tasks, and the results obtained are presented. After evaluation, the rate monotonic scheduling algorithm has been recommended as suitable concurrency design pattern for the development of airborne application. The recommendations have been finalized by keeping in consideration the simplicity, stability, scaling, scheduling overheads and optimality of the design patterns.