6.3.4 Approaches to Certification of Reconfigurable IMA Systems

Abstract

The aerospace industry has been investigating integrated modular avionics (IMA) for some years. IMA offers greater flexibility in the use of computing resources by reconfiguring the software to employ different processors and communications, in order to recover from failure and to redistribute workload. Such reconfiguration offers benefits, but poses difficulties for certification since current certification practice requires assessment of each configuration.The approach we have adopted is to seek means of clearing a configuration of a system and to identify a number of “equivalent” configurations. This requires us to establish “safe” reconfigurations for the IMA system. Technically, we have formulated the search for a set of “equivalent” configurations as a multi‐objective optimisation problem. Pragmatically, the search produces configuration tables which could be used by the IMA operating system to make a “safe” change to an “equivalent” configuration, when necessary.