Real-time virtual machines for avionics software migration

Generalised Rate Monotonic Scheduling (GRMS) theory has now been widely adopted in practice and supported by open standards. In recent years, Ada runtime and COTS RTOSs supporting GRMS have met the DO 178B flight control standard (http://www.ddci.com/products_darts.shtml; http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/publications/pdf/2000–0213.pdf). This creates strong incentives for the avionics industry to migrate from a traditional cyclical executive based system called a federated architecture to a GRMS based system to take advantage of GRMS’s flexibility, and theoretical schedulability analysis. However, the industry is reluctant to migrate due to enormous potential re-certification cost. This paper presents a novel software architecture called a Logical Federated Architecture (LFA) that greatly reduces re-certification cost due to the change of scheduling methods.