Most patterns address only the architectural forms of components, interfaces, connections, and protocols, delving into details only when they impact overall design. These patterns may be used to generate instances of a family of concrete architectures and designs that may be implemented using a number of different languages, tools, and systems. Because of the diversity of platforms and programming languages used in avionics systems, implementation details are notably absent. This collection of patterns also omits sufficient description of signal processing and control algorithms, device characteristics of radar systems and other navigation hardware, pilot instrument and user interface design, and mechanical effector systems necessary to actually construct an ACS from scratch. Given the extensive history of avionics system design, the most likely users of this set of design patterns include people learning about the design space leading to different avionics architectures, developers redesigning existing systems, and those building new families of components.
Most entries take a simple form.
They start with a description of the context, problem-space, and constraints, and then describe associated Design Steps , normally in a prescriptive manner, and sometimes subdivided into sets of related steps and concerns. A Glossary provides definitions of many of the terms used in this document.