Press Releases

DIANA stands for Distributed, equipment Independent environment for Advanced avioNics Applications. It is an avionics R&D project funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme and led by Skysoft, Portugal. The purpose of DIANA project is to define an advanced platform, called AIDA (Architecture for Independent Distributed Avionics), supporting execution of object-oriented applications over virtual machines and secure distribution services. The development process for the new platform will be based on the OMG standard Model Driven Engineering (MDE).

"We were looking for ARINC 653 compliant RTOS," said Tobias Schoofs, DIANA project leader at Skysoft. "PikeOS was like an obvious choice to us. Not only it has successfully passed our ARINC 653 Part 3 Verification Tool (AVT), but their virtualization capability makes it the ideal solution to support future applications. The fact that PikeOS has been already selected by five other European projects confirms our choice."

Main parts of the application will be hosted on a PC running PikeOS. Smaller test applications – like redundant components and sensors, for instance, will be hosted using light-weight simulators on other PC. The integrator of the platform is Embraer. Main developers are Thales, Alenia Sia, Alenia Aeronautica, Aonix and Skysoft. The development will start in October with studies dedicated to design details and the PikeOS integration already to be started in August.

PikeOS is a ground-breaking product providing an embedded systems platform where multiple virtual machines can run simultaneously in a secure environment. This secure virtualization technology allows multiple operating system APIs to run independently and concurrently on one machine - for example an ARINC 653 application together with Linux. The PikeOS safe and secure virtualization RTOS platform provides the widest range of operational guest operating system or run-time environment "personalities" on the market.

The PikeOS microkernel architecture allows it to be used in cost sensitive, resource constrained devices as well as large, complex systems. PikeOS is certifiable to the DO-178B standard, and is also MILS-compliant.

More information at www.sysgo.com/pikeos

About DIANA

The introduction of the DIANA concepts is expected to bring a development cost and time reduction. DIANA integrates promising technologies, such as CORBA, Java and data-centric communication mechanisms with field-proven IMA approaches. The usage of such technologies in real time environment and the update of standards, like ARINC 653, will provide new opportunities to create the future IMA architectures for the next generation of aircraft. Members of the DIANA consortium are: Skysoft (Portugal), Alenia Aeronautica and Alenia SIA (Italy), Aonix (France), Budapest University of Technology (Hungary), Dassault Aviation (France), Embraer (Brazil), NLR (Netherlands), Thales Group (France), University of Karlsruhe (Germany).

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/30985