Barco Selects Adacore For Advanced Avionics Applications

AdaCore today announced that global display company Barco has developed an advanced business jet avionics display system using the AdaCore GNAT Pro Ada development environment. Barco selected the GNAT Pro High Integrity Edition , along with the Traceability Kit, running on Wind River's VxWorks 653 RTOS in order to meet the highest levels of safety standard DO-178B.

The display unit runs up to seven flight- and mission-critical applications including pfd, mfd, maps, video, maintenance and charts. It is based on Barco's open, modular MOSArt infrastructure with each application meeting different criticality levels within the DO-178B standard. AdaCore was selected due to its close relationship with Wind River and its ability to provide traceability evidence between source and object code, ensuring faster standards compliance.

Barco's MOSArt system is based on VxWorks 653, an ARINC 653 compliant kernel that allows integration of several applications into the same unit. The VxWorks 653 operating system guarantees segregation of other Barco (or customer) avionics software applications. MOSArt's open, modular approach reduces weight and power consumption and improves mean time between failures by allowing the integration of several applications into the same hardware platform. With MOSArt, every partition can have a different criticality level (up to DO-178B level A) for minimal certification cost.

Global technology company Barco designs and develops visualisation products for a variety of selected professional markets. Every day, nearly 100 of the world's leading aircraft and helicopter types take off with Barco's advanced avionics display technology on board.

To enable the delivery of advanced avionics display solutions we require extreme high integrity development software, said Brecht Baert, R&D Manager Open Systems, Barco Avionics Division. AdaCore's traceability kit, tools that help simplify and automate certain DO-178B processes and a close partnership with Wind River are the natural choices for this project because they exactly meet our needs.

GNAT Pro High-Integrity Edition for DO-178B is an enhanced version of GNAT Pro, designed for building safe and secure software. Its many features help to reduce the cost of developing and certifying systems that have to meet safety standards such as RTCA DO-178B / EUROCAE ED-12B and other high-integrity standards. The product was specifically tailored to provide the features needed in the development of avionics systems, while removing unneeded features to simplify certification to DO-178B Level A. Barco is also using the GNAT Pro Traceability Kit. This is designed to help developers to meet the stringent DO-178B safety critical avionics standard by enabling full traceability between the source and object code.

Barco is a long standing AdaCore customer and the regular and close contacts that AdaCore establishes with his customers brought significant benefits in the context of the MOSArt platform developed by Barco, said Michaël Friess, Sales & Business Development Manager, AdaCore. In the MOSArt platform, the Ada language has been chosen for its particular adaptation to the stringent development processes required by the level A of the DO-178B standard. To complement this choice, AdaCore has used its expertise to provide a Traceability Kit that replaces the long and costly traditional source to object code traceability analysis while still increasing the language subset allowed.