2. Model-Based Design and Automated Validation of ARINC653 Architectures Using the AADL

Safety-Critical Systems as used in avionics systems are now extremely software-reliant. As these systems are life- or mission-critical, software must be carefully designed and certified according to stringent standards. One typical pitfall of corresponding development project is the late detection of safety issues or bugs at integration time that impose to redo development steps. Model-Based Engineering aims at capturing system concerns with specific notations and use models to drive the development process through all its phases—design, validation, implementation and ultimately, certification. Through a single consistent notation, such an approach would avoid undefined assumptions and traditional hurdles due to informal, text-based, specifications. In this chapter, we present recent contributions we pushed forward in the AADL architecture description language for the design and validation of Integrated Modular Avionics systems. First, we review modeling patterns to support abstractions for Integrated Modular Avionics systems. We then introduce capabilities to check all ARINC653 patterns are enforced at model-level. In addition, we review error modeling and safety analysis capabilities towards the production of safety reports conforming to ARP4761 recommendations, along with code generation strategies to map model elements to code. All these contributions are integrated in one uniform modeling process based on the AADL.