Cyber-physical avionics systems and its reliability evaluation

Avionics systems play a significant role in civil aircraft, and its reliability is directly related to the flight safe. In this paper, integrated modular avionics (IMA), as the most advanced avionics systems, is analyzed. Via exploration of the interaction mechanism of IMA and real physical system, its property of cyber-physical systems (CPS) is determined. Hence, according to different functional modules, a cyber-physical avionics systems model is established for IMA, meanwhile task-oriented state spaces of sub-units in CPS architecture are assigned to construct the hierarchical model for reliability model of IMA. A mathematic formula is presented to calculate reliability. The key contribution is that task-oriented cyber-physical idea is applied, and a hierarchical model for reliability analysis of IMA is presented. At last, reliability model is applied to a case study, which shows that two different way to raise IMA reliability.