ARINC 659 scheduling: problem definition

Honeywell is completing integration of the new Boeing 777 integrated Airplane Information Management System (AIMS). AIMS functions range from hard real-time to non-real-time, include flight-critical and non-essential functions, and must all reside on the same distributed multiprocessor system. This system, based on Aeronautical Radio Inc.'s ARINC 659 specification, allows for high resource utilization while providing strict partitioning and provable performance via pre-scheduling of processing and communication resources. Such scheduling presents significant theoretical and practical problems. This paper describes these scheduling requirements with the intent of providing the research community with practical bounds for problem definition.