Towards Reliability Evaluation of AFDX Avionic Communication Systems With Rare-Event Simulation

Reliability is a major concern for avionic systems. The risks in their design can be minimized by using model-based systems engineering methods including simulation and mathematical analysis. However, there are non-functional properties that are computationally expensive to evaluate, for instance when rare events are important. Rare-event simulation methods such as RESTART can be used, leading to speedups of several orders of magnitude. We consider AFDX (avionic full-duplex switched Ethernet) networks as an application example here, where the end-to-end delay and buffer utilizations are important for a safe and efficient system design. The paper proposes generic model patterns for AFDX networks, and shows how very low probabilities can be computed in acceptable time with the presented method and software tool