Avionics HMI developers depend on both in-house and COTS HMI tools in their day-to-day work. Unfortunately, many of these solutions support only a narrow set of embedded computing platforms or do not meet the performance requirements that a program defines. This means that engineering choices can be limited for HMI software and hardware combinations at the initial design phase and that seemingly straightforward hardware upgrades during an aircraft's lifecycle can become problematic. Beyond these hardware constraints, HMI designers often have to deal with a disjunction between groups developing the prototypes and those deploying to the target platform whereby applications are frequently completely re-coded for the final environment, resulting in little opportunity for re-use from prototyping to production. This type of sequential re-development of a display makes it very difficult to make any changes to the design late in the development cycle or even to be able to evaluate a display iteratively in its production environment. To overcome these restrictions and inefficiencies, engineers can invest in vendor-agnostic COTS HMI tools, such as VAPS XT from Presagis. By grouping all function calls that are specific to an operating system or a graphic library, the porting layer acts as a bridge between the HMI design and embedded computing platforms. There are many benefits to using a tool based around a porting layer, including: (1) increase design flexibility; (2) enabling HMI designers to keep refining their displays until the very end of a project cycle; (3) facilitate avionics updates after initial program deployment; (4) deployment on multiple embedded platforms; (5) injection of new features through product upgrades during the development cycle Whether customized in-house or by a third-party service, the porting layer eliminates the constraints associated with choosing COTS embedded software and hardware based solely on existing interoperability.
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