The flight deck innovation group at Gulfstream researches and develops innovative flight deck technologies for the company’s line of business jets. Central to flight deck operations are the integrated modular avionics (IMA) architectures Gulfstream uses to orchestrate numerous real-time airborne systems, which are developed either by company engineers or by suppliers.

In the past, external and internal teams used XML-based interface control documents to define communications between systems within these architectures. The XML files required a significant amount of time and manual effort to create and maintain. Further, given the difficulty of visualizing system interactions from these files, teams resorted to creating static block diagrams that were not well integrated with underlying system implementations.

To address the inefficiencies of this approach to developing large, complex aircraft systems, Gulfstream has created and adopted eSAM, a new systems engineering method built on System Composer™. Gulfstream engineers use System Composer to build functional, physical, and logical architecture models of electronic systems; model integration between systems; and directly connect system architecture models to software functional models in Simulink^®.