Verifying Resource Adequacy of Networked IMA Systems at Concept Level

Abstract

Complex cyber-physical systems can be difficult to analyze for resource adequacy at the concept development stage since relevant models are hard to create. During this period, details about the functions to be executed or the platforms in the architecture are partially unknown. This is especially true for Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) Systems, for which life-cycles span over several decades, with potential changes to functionality in the future. To support the engineers evaluating conceptual designs there is a need for tools that model resources of interest in an abstract manner and allow analyses of changing architectures in a modular and scalable way. This work presents a generic timed automatabased model of a networked IMA system abstracting complex networking and computational elements of an architecture, but representing the communication needs of each application function using UPPAAL templates. The proposed model is flexible and can be modified/extended to represent different types of network topologies and communication patterns. More specifically, the different components of the IMA network, Core Processing Modules, Network End-Systems, and Switches, are represented by different templates. The templates are then instantiated to represent a conceptual design, and fed into a model checker to verify that a given platform instance supports the desired system functions in terms of network bandwidth and buffer size adequacy -in particular, whether messages can reach their final destination on time. The work identifies the limits of the tool used for this evaluation, but the conceptual model can be carried over to other tools for further studies.

Exploring Trade-offs in Concept Design of Integrated Modular Avionic Platform Configurations : Topology Generation, Resource Adequacy, and Dependability

“…These contributions are realized as six publications [77,73,72,74,75,76] hereafter referred to as papers I to VI, all of which are listed in Section 1.5.…”