A Server for ARINC 615A Loading

Abstract: The development of the next generation of Saab's multirole combat aircraft the JAS 39 Gripen includes developing a lot of new software for the aircraft's on-board computers. The new software has to be loaded into these computers routinely, in order to carry out testing on it. This is currently a slow and tedious process. In order to load the computers a protocol defined in the ARINC 615A standard is used. Today Saab uses commercial software applications implementing this protocol for the loading process. These applications have significant disadvantages, such as not being able to load several computers in parallel or only being able to load computers from a specific manufacturer. In this thesis we introduce a system using a client-server architecture that allows users to load the computers in parallel, regardless of the manufacturer. In Section 3.2.2 we show that our system reduces the time required to load the aircraft's on-board computers significantly. We also indicate some improvements that can be made in order to speed up the process even further. These improvements mainly involve improving the on-board computers themselves through the use of faster persistent storage and support for later revisions of the protocol involved.