nEUROn UCAV programme

In case you missed the news, the article 'COTS for unmanned flights' (Electronic Product Design, 22nd April 2008) describes how the nEUROn UCAV programme (Airforce Technology) has standardized on the VxWorks 653 RTOS.

nEUROn is a technology demonstrator programme involving five European companies, which in itself is not unusual, but it does have a significant objective - to demonstrate the maturity of technologies by producing modular safety-critical avionics systems running on COTS-based on-board computers. The development of avionics systems for a UCAV are in some ways even more challenging than for a military fast jet, given that it will provide a similar level of capability, but yet has less Space, Weight and Power (SWaP) available. This is one of the driving factors behind the ARINC 653 software architecture, enabling multiple applications to be hosted on a common computing platform (see 'ARINC 653 software weighs less' for background).

However, this advance results in a further challenge, that of being able to support modular and incremental certification of the IMA platform. This is necessary because of the very significant costs of safety certification under RTCA/DO-178B and EUROCAE ED-12B, especially at the higher software integrity levels (SIL). If an avionics platform comprising, say ten applications and several million source lines of code (SLOC) has been developed, and one of the applications undergoes an upgrade, it would be very time-consuming and prohibitively expensive to re-certify the whole platform. Alex Wilson covers these issues in more depth in his webcast 'Towards Incremental Certification with ARINC653'.

Fortunately, the experiences gained on recent IMA programmes in conjunction with the evolution of ARINC 653 standard has resulted in the mature VxWorks 653 implementation which fulfills these requirements and will provide a critical foundation for the objectives of the nEUROn programme.

I'll look forward to the nEUROn taking off in 2010.