COTS-Based Replacement Strategy for Aging Avionics Computers; Journal article

摘要

This article describes a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)-based form, fit, function, and interface replacement strategy for legacy avionics computers and embedded information systems that can reuse existing software code while providing a flexible framework for incremental upgrades and managed change. It is based on a real-time embedded software technology that executes legacy binary code on the latest generation COTS microprocessors. This scalable technology, developed by TRW and sponsored in part by the Air Force Research Laboratory, demonstrates performance improvements of 5 to 20 times that of the legacy avionics computer that it replaces. It also promises a 4-fold decrease in cost and schedule over rewriting the code, and provides a known, good starting point for incremental upgrades of the embedded flight software. Code revalidation cost and risk are minimized since the structure of the embedded code is not changed, allowing the replacement computer to be retested at the black-box level using existing qualification tests.