Design and Implementation of Distributed Avionics Communication and Maintenance Software

As the brain and central nervous system of aircraft, Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) system has a significant impact on the safe flight of aircraft. In addition, due to the internal cross-linking of multiple components in the IMA system, it is often difficult for troubleshooting when hardware components fail. Therefore, this paper proposes a distributed avionics communication and maintenance software with an actual hardware status monitoring. A lightweight distributed hardware platform based on microcontroller units (MCUs) has been designed to form a communication network to monitor the status of hardware components within the IMA system. The software design is as follows. Firstly, the MCU’s rich ADC, SPI, I2C and other peripheral interfaces are used to collect hardware information. Then, the collected hardware information of each module and sub-card inside the IMA platform is tested and the status of each test item is recorded as normal or faulty. Finally, the processed status information of each component is reported to the CPU on a single module and the core control node in the entire IMA platform for overall synthesis. The proposed software in this paper has been applied in practical engineering. It helps to improve the testability and maintainability of IMA system, and provides necessary auxiliary analysis for later troubleshooting.