Hybrid partition- and network-level scheduling design for distributed integrated modular avionics systems

Distributed Integrated Modular Avionics (DIMA) develops from Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) and realizes distributed integration of multiple sub-function areas. Time-triggered network provides effective support for time synchronization and information coordination in DIMA systems. However, inconsistency between processing resources and communication network destroys the time determinism benefiting from partitions and time-triggered mechanism. To ensure such time determinism and achieve guaranteed real-time performance, system design should collectively provide a global communication scheme for messages in network domain and a corresponding execution scheme for partitions in processing domain. This paper firstly establishes a general DIMA model which coordinates partitioned processing and time-triggered communication, and then proposes a hybrid scheduling algorithm using Mixed Integer Programming to produce feasible system schemes. Furthermore, incrementally integrating new functions causes upgrades or reconfigurations of DIMA systems and will generate integration cost. To control such cost, this paper further develops an optimization algorithm based on Maximum Satisfiability Problem and guarantees that the scheduling design for upgraded DIMA systems inherit their original schemes as much as possible. Finally, two typical cases, including a simple fully connected DIMA system case and an industrial DIMA system case, are constructed to illustrate our DIMA model and validate the effectiveness of our hybrid scheduling algorithms.