Aircraft level optimization of avionics architectures with MLDesigner

Avionic systems in aircrafts are today highly complex systems with more than 1000 electronic control units, located centralized behind the cockpit. Long cables pass through the aircraft to actuators, sensors, communication and display units. This architecture is very sensitive to design changes in the aircraft. Currently used design methodology can neither optimize at overall system level, nor can it avoid critical errors during design. These errors have to be found and eliminated during time consuming and expensive integration steps.

Recent research work at the Technical University of Ilmenau (TU-Ilmenau), Germany in cooperation with a major European aircraft manufacturer demonstrated that this problem can be overcome. An aircraft level avionics architecture optimization methodology has been developed, that distributes electronic components optimally between feasible locations that meet maintenance requirements. The diverse tasks of the design flow like topology optimization, architecture model generation, mapping of behavioral models into the optimized architecture, and functional and performance verification were automated using the multi domain simulation and model generation capabilities of MLDesigner.

Aircraft level architecture optimization reduced wiring by 68% and increased availability by several orders of magnitude compared to a reference architecture. A large reduction of weight and costs has been made possible.