Aircraft Systems Classifications

7Modelling of Systems Architectures

7.1 Introduction

The systems described in Chapters 3–5 form the basis of architectures that will be used in a completed project. At the early stages of the design, it is most likely that a number of different architectures will emerge. A mechanism is required for assessing the suitability of these architectures and arriving at an optimal solution based on measures such as mass, volume, power consumption, cost, and fitness for purpose. This can be a time‐consuming task and an automated model driven methodology is to be preferred (Butz 2007). This chapter looks at some methods currently being examined and proposes an example methodology.

The system architecture and the proposed methodology studied in this chapter are relevant to avionics integration and architecture since the avionics system architectures have reached to a level of complexity that designing a new architecture and/or upgrading legacy architecture manually does not work well. In other words, it is crucial to exploit the full potential concept of integrated modular architectures (IMA) and/or distributed integrated modular architectures (DIMA) architectures which seems impossible through designing architectures by hand. Therefore, in recent years, a trend to create computer‐aided design and model‐based design tools is growing. The main goal of these tools is to provide an automatic and/or semi‐automatic avionics architecture optimisation tool. The input to these tools is a model ...