EADS Airbus

Toulouse, France
www.airbus.com

Role

Requirements, dissemination and exploitation.

Specific skills

Airbus is one of the main aircraft manufacturers and part of EADS, a major company in the field of aeronautics, space and defence. Its products line comprises a wide range of single-aisle aircrafts (100+ seats) up to the largest passenger aircraft in the world, the A380. The Airbus expertise in the technical domains in line with its sector of activity is widely acknowledged, thanks to the amount of its involvement and efforts in terms of R&T.

Development of avionics equipment is part of the core activities of the group, most particularly at Airbus France, the French subsidiary of Airbus. Airbus France is regularly leading research activities on the definition of highly deterministic numeric cores architectures dedicated to safety-critical applications (e.g. electric flight-control systems, also called “fly-by-wire”) and the definition of associated methodologies for WCET analysis.

Major research activities on methodology for WCET analysis have been performed by Airbus France in the IST project DAEDALUS. The results of this project have been successfully deployed in the frame of the A380 program on two safety-critical applications, with the support of a WCET analysis tool provided by AbsInt.

Research activities in the field of highly deterministic digital core architectures have, until now, always been performed internally with the occasional support of French research laboratories. However, the volume and complexity of this research has been strongly increasing over the last years, especially due to increasing levels of electronics integration and increasing needs for processing power, calling for an ever-increasing processor architecture complexity, while still being able to guarantee a WCET for supported applications. Consequently, Airbus France is more than ever interested in taking part in ambitious focused projects such as PREDATOR.

Key personnel