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.
About Java News Desk JDJ News Desk monitors the world of Java to present IT professionals with updates on technology advances, business trends, new products and standards in the Java and i-technology space.
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