Simulator­based testing environment for avionics software: a feasibility study

S Flores (1) , P Le Meur (2) , J F Renneson (2)

1 Atos Origin Integration
2 Airbus [France]

Hardware execution targets are widely used for software testing in the avionics industry to ensure that the tests represent the behaviour on the actual aircraft's calculators to a maximum degree At the same time, software simulators of the Integrated Modular Avionics structure are used on several system integration benches for calculator validation or as a part of full flight simulators. We substituted a hardware target with a specific software simulator in order to create a new testing platform that provides application developers with features not found on hardware­based environments. Such features include greater availability of testing platforms, debugging capabilities and an easier and faster testing process. Our goal was to evaluate the feasibility of a full migration to the resulting simulator­based testing environment. We identified several industrial constraints and technical problems to achieve this migration and approached them by developing progressive prototypes of the components of the new testing system and of the interfaces between them. Our project’s validation plan included comparing the results of both hardware­based and simulator­based platforms when executing a set of representative avionics tests.

Keywords: Integrated modular avionics; simulation; embedded software testing

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Embedded Systems

S Flores, P Le Meur, J F Renneson. Simulator­based testing environment for avionics software: a feasibility study. 4th International Congress ERTS 2008, Jan 2008, toulouse, France. ⟨insu-02269750⟩