Design considerations for broker federation architectures for data-driven business processes in aviation

The competition of airlines and pressure on cost requires them to continuously improve their business processes. For this, a number of innovation projects aim to create data-driven services. To provide the information required to enable a data-driven service in aviation, communication networks interconnect systems installed in the aircraft as well as ground-based systems. In this paper, a novel modularized communication architecture, i.e., interconnecting multiple airborne systems as well as ground-based systems, considering known and relevant aviation standards is proposed. To this end, the concept of message broker federation is studied and results are used to deduce a generic, modularized and federated communication architecture. The design considerations for this communication architecture also comprise the security domain model in accordance with the ARINC 664 P5 standard. Thus, means are proposed to secure the broker-based communication on an architectural level and to ensure airworthiness security. The viability of the proposed generic communication architecture is discussed by creating two specific instances of the generic architecture tailored to realize different example use cases. Both resulting federated broker architectures, one for a physical distributed demonstrator as part of a research project and the other for a virtual extensible testbed, have been implemented and initial validation confirmed its success.