DDC-I’s Multicore DO-178C Deos RTOS Hosts Honeywell Flight Management System for Airbus
Safety-critical multicore RTOS gives Airbus flight management system unprecedented multi-core performance, modularity, scalability, and reuse DDC-I announced that its DO-178 Deos™ multicore real-time operating system (RTOS) has been selected by Honeywell to host its new Flight Management System (FMS). Airbus will utilize the next-generation Honeywell FMS to meet the air traffic management needs of its new A320, A330, and A350 twinjets, with service entry planned for the end of 2026.
“Deos has flown for millions of hours in systems aboard commercial air transport, business jet, military aircraft, and helicopters,” said Greg Rose, vice president of marketing and product management at DDC-I. “We are excited to have been selected by Honeywell for this state-of-the-art flight management system. Advanced multicore capabilities that uniquely address CAST-32A objectives, binary modularity, and reusable certification evidence make our DO-178C DAL A Deos avionics platform the perfect safety-critical environment for developing, certifying, and deploying advanced flight management systems.”
Honeywell’s FMS provides the primary navigation, flight planning, optimized route determination, and en route guidance for the A320, A330, A350, and A380 platforms, delivering best-in-class operational efficiency, reliability, and safety. The next-generation FMS will also incorporate connectivity with non-avionics systems in the outside world, such as Electronic Flight Bags and airline operational control centers.
The new FMS combines multiple current Airbus FMS offerings into a single standardized hardware and software platform for Airbus aircraft, providing the multi-core performance, functionality, and modularity needed to deliver future enhancements without hardware changes. After development, the new FMS will be a standalone federated system, making it easier for operators to support the fleet.
Deos is a safety-critical embedded RTOS that employs patented cache partitioning, memory pools, and safe scheduling to deliver higher CPU utilization than any other certifiable safety-critical COTS RTOS on multi-core processors. First certified to DO-178 DAL A in 1998, Deos provides a FACE™ Conformant Safety Base and Safety Extended Profiles that features hard real-time response, time and space partitioning, and Rate Monotonic, ARINC-653 and POSIX interfaces.
SafeMC technology extends Deos’ advanced capabilities to multiple cores, enabling developers of safety-critical systems to achieve best-in-class multi-core performance without compromising safety-critical task response and guaranteed execution time. SafeMC employs a bound multiprocessing (BMP) extension of the symmetric multiprocessing architecture (SMP), safe scheduling, and cache partitioning to minimize cross-core contention and interference patterns that affect the performance, safety criticality and certifiability of multi-core systems. These features enable avionics systems, and developers, to address issues that could impact the safety, performance, and integrity of a software airborne system specified by multicore guidance contained in AC-20-193 (draft) and AMC-20-193 (released).