Rapid Prototyping of Complex Avionic System Architectures

This paper describes a design tool called ECATE (Expert Consultant for Avionics System Transformation Exploitation) developed by the Avionics System and Equipment Group of Aeritalia. ECATE, rapidly prototyping different alternatives, helps the designer in establishing the information flow architecture of the avionics system, that is the organization of the internal data handling. The tool provides the user with an interface to assist him in describing the avionics from the point of view of the data handling, and presents the results in a suitable format; it performs consistency checks and advices the user on possible architectural problems by means of the expert system techniques. The paper contains also some indications on the development environment of the tool and how it works in a consulting session. Some examples give an idea of the result that can be obtained. Conclusion is that not only the tool is valuable for the information flow architecture design but also it shows that the use of the knowledge engineering and the Artificial Intelligence techniques can be effective to meet the problems arising when complex systems, not only avionics, are involved. NATO Furnished. (rh)