Research On The Architecture Of Muti-Function Avionics Flying Laboratory

With the rapid development of the aviation industry and much more complex of avionics equipments today, how to develop a multi-purpose Avionics Flying Laboratory(AFL) which can support multi-device testing and validation is an emerging hotspot. AFL which was originally developed for the Joint Strike Fighter(JSF) project is proposed by the "Fly-Fix-Fly" concept. By providing real flight environment, it can highly improve the accuracy and precision, effectively expose more problems when test and verify avionics equipments. In this paper, it takes AFL system architecture as its research topic, regards ITVS as a logical partition, interconnects all sub-system and integrated core processor(ICP) with unified fiber channel, and carries out by three parts as follow.1. Being considered the differences in composition between AFL and general aircraft, it can add an integrated test and verify system(ITVS) to provide the foundation for the key functions of system. Because the system needs to be compatible with different devices of various aircrafts, it should be an open architecture designed by IMA architecture. After analyze on the system hardware architecture, software architecture, and system management mechanism, design its architecture in detail.2. Analyze the system requirement of network bus, then design network topologies and protocols, further study their information transmission control mechanism. Select FC switched network which is an open bus and has excellent performance as the unified bus of AFL system to interconnect each subsystem. Through studying the information model of system, analyze the characteristics of the system information transmission, and then propose an information transmission control method different with the traditional 1553 bus.3. Real-time capability, throughput and processing ability are the important indications of AFL system performance. These indications are closely related to the task performance of testing and verification and susceptible by system architecture. Through theoretically analyze the system delay, use mathematical modeling compare the real-time performance between federated and IMA AFL. Then adopt another way to simulate its real-time performance and throughput in OPNET. As for the processing ability, after theoretically analysis, define it with the utilization rate of active state processor and speed-up ratio when AFL is working, and then compare the two performances in different architectures through simulation.