MDA Compliant Concept for Maintaining Embedded Multifunction Displays

Abstract—This article provides a holistic concept for a Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) compliant embedded multifunction display (MFD) development addressing the challenges of MFD SW maintenance. Embedded MFDs show information from their parent system in form of symbols, providing clarity and user support. Especially in persistent systems such as a helicopter MFDs demand constant maintenance and adaptation. Because of the concentrated display of system activity the MFD software (SW) has to face MFD-specific and display-relevant system changes. Since the MFD is highly dependent on other systems, display relevant system changes cause a MFD SW modification. Therefore MFD SW maintenance has to take the embedded character into account, e.g. how changes in information of display relevant systems are adapted to the MFD symbols. Current development models for embedded systems encourage partitioning the systems into further (sub-)systems and designing them independently from each other for parallel and time-saving development. In case of MFD symbol modification caused by other systems, however, dependency is desired, and current approaches based on independent subsystems give no clear instructions how and in which development stage the MFD will get the information, making the SW maintenance process time consuming.

Index Terms—Multifunction displays, embedded systems, SW maintenance, display symbols, model-driven SW development.

Q. Zhang is with the Economic Informatics Institute at the University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich, 85579, Neubiberg (e-mail: qi.zhang@unibw.de).
A. Karcher is with Application Integration at the Institute of Applied Informatics at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich, 85579, Neubiberg (e-mail: andreas.karcher@unibw.de).

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Cite: Q. Zhang and A. Karcher, "MDA Compliant Concept for Maintaining Embedded Multifunction Displays," Lecture Notes on Software Engineering vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 205-209, 2014.