Avionics Project

June,2002

done for

Dimension Cybertech
Nila, Technopark, Trivandrum
 

Dimension is a company that among other things, provides solutions for airline companies.
Their software is aimed at recovering data for aircraft blackboxes and analyzing the data obtained.
Issues

• The data in the black boxes is usually in some encrypted bit-packed format
• The data of various aircraft is kept in different formats in the blackbox
• The data is voluminous
• The data consists of readout values from devices in the aircraft
• These values need to be converted into engineering values according to the aircraft manuals.
• The devices that are monitored, ie the number of parameters in the data are different according to the machine
• The flight manuals contains limit specifications on many of these values and values derivable from these - these exceedences have to be checked for.
• The data has to be presented to the user in terms of charts, graphs, exceedence tables, flight simulations etc

Dimension has solutions for a few aircrafts types of their clients. but these solutions are aircraft specific. Thus when a new aircraft comes along there are new data types available, a different data format for the incoming data etc. So conventionally the application had to be re written - an expensive process.

The company has plans for developing a software package that can be customizable to different aircraft types (hopefully) without any modification to the program source. This is a little ambitious computationally because here the application is expected to cope with a different data source format - different data values - different kind of prerequisites on the data - visual interfaces to the different data.

(philosophically if you look at this, it is rather interesting, especially if you generalize the case - 
something that has input about anything, anyhow 
and does anything you want with it 
and outputs anything you want... 
borders of the definition of intelligence and of the high school definition of what a computer is 
                    - a machine that takes input and gives output)