Automatic safety computation for IMA systems

During the last years, the integrated modular avionics (IMA) design philosophy became widely established at aircraft manufacturers, giving rise to a series of new design challenges, most notably the allocation of avionics functions to the various IMA components and the placement of this equipment in the aircraft. This paper presents a modelling approach for avionics that allows for automatic computation of the safety of large and heavily interdependent systems, and shall help to quickly evaluate candidate system configurations during early and intermediate design. It is part of a project striving to automatise some steps of the design process by applying an optimisation algorithm which searches for system configurations that fulfil the safety requirements and have low costs.