As one of today’s avionics system engineers, you have a difficult task — integrating a diverse range of functionally complex components, provided by multiple suppliers, into a system that is reliable enough to ensure consistent aircraft performance and passenger safety. You also need to understand and meet numerous regulatory operating systems and protocols, including ARINC 653, ARINC 429, CAN and ARINC 664.
Creating a well-integrated, robust systems architecture is quite an undertaking. It requires you to generate an Interface Control Document (ICD), a large Excel spreadsheet that gathers data and inputs from multiple avionics system suppliers and accurately reflects all system components interactions and interdependencies — including hardware and software redundancies, messaging hierarchies, data inputs and numerous communication switches.
To produce this document — which details all system hierarchies, interactions, timing and controls — you need to ensure that all inputs are not only accurate, but consistent with one another. This requires tedious manual checking and rechecking; if a modification is made in one component, it must be verified against hundreds of other inputs to ensure that overall system integrity is maintained.
The effort to create ICDs does pay off. It’s been estimated that, just by automating changes in one component across the entire system architecture, you can achieve an efficiency improvement as high as 300 percent. Manual tasks that currently take weeks can be accomplished in days by applying the right software solution.
Meanwhile, though, there is pressure to finish this task quickly, so that the aircraft can be launched with confidence, against very aggressive timetables.
Given the technical sophistication of avionics components, the pressure to work quickly and the mission-critical nature of your tasks, clearly a new, more automated and more intelligent solution is required, a new generation of customized software solutions to help design the systems of tomorrow.
I’m excited to let you know that the new SCADE System Avionics Package, released with ANSYS 17.0, is that software solution. With the ANSYS SCADE System Avionics Package, you can model the various steps of system integration in a step-by-step manner to greatly simplify and accelerate your design process, while ensuring that all relevant protocols have been met. And, you can completely automate the creation of an ICD — automatically reflecting any minor component changes at the system level. This eliminates hours of manual modifications and minimizes the risk of human error.
The SCADE System Avionics Package also provides you with design templates for avionics systems, easing the systems development process. It is compliant with standard protocols and operation systems including those most commonly applied like ARINC 653, ARINC 429, CAN and ARINC 664-P7 (AFDX). We also include a comprehensive industrial example of a braking system in the package to guide you through the development process and help you to implement best practices when designing your avionics system. The SCADE System Avionics Package also features a FACE™ extension so that you can design avionics systems in compliance with the FACE shared data model. And, the SCADE System Avionics Package is fully customizable because all configurations are provided as graphical models for reuse and support company-specific methods.
I hope that you are as excited as I am about this new tool. You can find out more by downloading the “A Model-Based Solution for Avionics Systems Engineering: The New Industry Imperative” white paper or joining me for an upcoming webinar, “SCADE System Avionics Package: How to design comprehensive ICDs.”
I’ve also created a short demo video. Take a look at it now!
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