Model-based design analysis of an Avionics Fuel Distributed Control System

Current development processes of complex safety-critical embedded systems basically demand integrated engineering tools, and a better way to predict software-intensive performance at early design phases by focusing on nonfunctional features such as dependability, safety, etc. A suitable approach for the integration of engineering tools is the model-based system engineering (MBSE). Within this development process framework, the case study in this research work is an avionic fuel distributed control system (AFDCS) with autonomous controllers embedded in conventional mechanical fuel components. The approach comes from a European Research Project named SmartFuel which already was successfully implemented, tested and validated at laboratory, and real-scaled prototypes. From these experimental results, this paper reviews and reanalyzes the proposed AFDCS architecture design, by focusing on the final business target that is the control software certification for the creation of interoperable commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) fuel components. The information gathered from the testing and validation impacts directly on the initial phases; requirements and design. The architecture analysis & design language (AADL) was selected as description language for modeling the AFDCS architecture. It is a standard which supports MBSE. Besides, AADL is perfectly suitable for AFDCSs since it allows deploying software models on different computer resources. This paper presents the AFDCS architecture refinement of a particular helicopter fuel system by reviewing and reanalyzing its integrated AADL model. It includes a summary of the main ADFCS architecture concepts, a description of the design analysis methodology based on AADL, the key architecture points analyzed on helicopter fuel distributed control system (HFDCS), and the results obtained.