Modeling towards incremental early analyzability of networked avionics systems using virtual integration

With the advance of hardware technology, more features are incrementally added to already existing networked systems. Avionics has a stronger tendency to use preexisting applications due to its complexity and scale. As resource sharing becomes intense among the network and the computing modules, it has become a difficult task for the system designer to make confident architectural decisions even for incremental changes. Providing a tailored environment to model and analyze incremental changes requires a combination of software tools and hardware support. We have built a virtual integration tool called ASIIST which can provide a worst-case end-to-end latency of data that is sent through a network and the internal bus architecture of the end-systems. Also, we have devised a new real-time switching algorithm which guarantees the worst-case network delay of preexisting network traffic under feasible conditions. With the real-time switch support, ASIIST can provide an early modularized analysis of the end-to-end latency to make architectural design choices and incremental changes easier for the user.