A Verification Algorithm for the Automatic Topology Discovery of the Adaptive Avionics Platform
Bernd Schulz, Björn Annighöfer · 2018
This paper introduces the concept, development and realisation of a topology verification algorithm for the autonomous topology discovery mechanism of the Adaptive Avionics Platform (AAP). The AAP is a fault-tolerant and self-configuring general-purpose avionics platform. An AAP instance is built from a set of generic hard- and software components, which can be combined to avionic systems of arbitrary extent, similar to Integrated Modular Avionics. It configures automatically during an organisation phase, based on information received through the topology discovery step. During this topology discovery, the topology of hardware components and physical connections is detected. Since the organisation phase is conducted without human interaction, errors during the topology discovery could solely be detected manually after the completion of the organisation phase. The objective of the topology verification algorithm is to verify discovered system topologies against expected topologies. This additional verification step guarantees an exact match of composed real-world system architectures with expected target architectures. In case of topology deviations, they are visualised as well as tracked to their respective error sources. Moreover, the verification algorithm shall enable the possibility to run automatic verification scenarios for a variety of different system topologies for automatic validation of the topology discovery mechanism. The implementation of the topology verification algorithm on an Adaptive Cabin Management System demonstrator shows that it is able to reliably evaluate if an auto-detected topology is congruent to an expected topology and provide a distinct method for the verification of the AAP.