Modern Avionics requirements for the Distributed Systems Annex

We ported an Architecture Description Language (ADL), MetaH, for automating the specification, analysis and building of Avionics/high reliability systems on top of Ada 95 and the Distributed Systems Annex (DSA). Our purpose was to explore the requirements for the DSA in such applications and to assess portability benefits. The problem domain of modern avionics will increasingly require strong partitioning of software with multilevel safety and reliability analysis to build highly complex, large, multiprocessor, predominately hard real-time software systems. This paper covers changes in the requirement driving the problem domain, the solution approach using an ADL, MetaH, on top of the DSA, and requirements for a usable DSA implementation.