Aonix announced that Aonix had been chosen to participate in DIANA, a (Distributed equipment Independent environment for Advanced avioNic Applications). DIANA, funded by the European Community at $4.26M, is chartered to modernize the tools and execution environments used in hard real-time and safety-certifiable avionics systems in order to reduce the development and ongoing operational costs of aircraft. Aonix will provide PERC Pico technology and virtual machine standards experience to support the DIANA initiative.

Aimed at keeping Europe’s competitive edge in air transportation, DIANA will implement an integrated modular electronics platform that will reduce aircraft development and operating costs, enable faster upgrade and replacement of avionics applications, and reduce onboard weight through better use of computational resources. DIANA will develop architecture, methodologies and concepts that enable the avionics supply chain to deliver enhanced functionality in a significantly smaller time frame.

“DIANA is an important project for the European Community,” said Laurent Mares, Aonix vice president of sales Europe. “Due to the intense scrutiny and certification cycles applied to avionics systems, the cost of bringing new airframes to market is staggering. Modernizing methodologies, languages and execution environments in a standard way will improve time to market and dramatically reduce development cost for some of the most expensive systems being built today.”

The project will bring some of the most influential and useful technologies together with existing or emerging standards relevant to avionics development and deployment. Under the umbrella of AIDA (Architecture for Independent Distributed Avionics), DIANA will define and promote common development and certification processes and strategies. Object-oriented technologies such as Java, and standards such as ARINC 653 multipartitioned operating environment specification for avionics; Real Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) and its subset JSR-302, the Java solution for safety-critical applications; Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker (CORBA) for middleware and the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) are all being considered as guidance for the project.

Aonix’s PERC Pico will provide the underpinning executional foundation for DIANA. The PERC Pico product implements key concepts of the evolving JSR-302 standard. PERC Pico delivers the portability and scalability benefits of Java to developers of low-level software components which have demanding performance, memory footprint, response time, and determinism requirements. As such, PERC Pico is ideal for many hard real-time and safety-critical development projects. Compared with traditional Java technologies, PERC Pico has a much smaller and simpler run-time environment, making it possible to economically develop the safety certification artifacts required by government auditors of applications such as commercial avionics, nuclear power generation, passenger rail, and medical instrumentation.

Since early 2003, Aonix has worked closely with the Open Group, a vendor-neutral industry consortium that supports the creation of standards for integrated information and global interoperability, to establish standards for the use of Java in the development of safety-critical software systems. In July 2006, this work was transitioned into the Java Community Process as Java Specification Request (JSR) 302, and an expert group was formed to address the issues of safety-critical development with Java. Aonix is a member of this expert group. Work on JSR-302 is ongoing. Aonix intends to refine its PERC Pico product to assure full compliance with the JSR-302 standard once that standard becomes official.

In this effort, Aonix joins key players in the European and global markets. Dassault Aviation, Alenia Aeronautica, and Embraer (all air framers/system integrators), and Thales Avionics (provider and system integrator of avionics applications), will participate in definition and implementation activities together with Budapest University of Technology and Economics, University of Karlsrhue, and the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR). Skysoft Portugal (a aeronautics, Security, Space and Telematics technology and systems provider) is prime contractor for DIANA, and alongside of Alenia SIA and Aonix will provide the simulation development and all COTS tools to be used by project participants.

Throughout specification and implementation stages, the DIANA team will work with EUROCAE WG71 to the develop certification guidelines for the new concepts adopted in AIDA like object-oriented programming, Java programming, MDE, model transformation, etc.