An ARINC 661 tutorial: an introduction

For those of you who don't know what ARINC661 can mean (and I bet that's the majority of those who will read this post, if there are any of course), I suggest you go to the Wikipedia article for ARINC 661. As it is written:
ARINC 661 is a standard which aims to normalize the definition of a Cockpit Display System (CDS), and the communication between the CDS and User Applications (UA) which manage Aircraft avionics functions. The GUI definition is completely defined in binary Definition Files (DF).

The CDS software is constituted of a kernel which is able to create the GUI hierarchy specified in the DF during initialization, thus not needing to be recompiled if the GUI definition changes.

Which must trigger something for those of you who are familiar with HTML, or even better, familiar with XUL, the Mozilla declarative interface language.

XUL made it possible to define the user interface of Firefox once in a XML file and run Firefox on every possible platform, rather than having to hard-code it for each platform, which would have been extremely burdensome and error prone. Rather than that, the Mozilla people thought better. They defined a grammar to define generic UI components (panels, buttons, sliders, etc...), and only had to implement each of these small components on the different platform they wanted to support. Oh and the engine which could assemble these components together. Smart idea. You only have to look at how Firefox has become a reference in the browsers world.

Well in the case of XUL the engine which assemble the widgets is called Gecko, and each specific UI is defined in a XUL XML file (well you can do a lot more than that, like defining your own widget templates for example, but we don't need to look into all of this now).

Let's say that ARINC 661 uses a Definition File (DF), which is the equivalent of the XUL file, and the engine is called ARINC 661 kernel or CDS (Cockpit Display System).

Well there are some differences: As it is designed to be used in avionics, ARINC 661 is designed to work in real-time systems, and a CDS must be DO-178B compliant. For this reasons there are some major differences between languages such as XUL and ARINC 661.

But don't be upset by this disclaimer. At the core, these languages share a lot of similarities, and ARINC 661 is not overly complex at its core. Which does not mean that it does not have its own subtleties BTW.


I realize that this post is already too long for an introduction. Let's close it to say a few other things about this standard before delving into details:

• ARINC 661 is an ARINC standard, used to standardize avionics concepts. Another very well know ARINC standard is ARINC 429, which is, as wikipedia says, the technical standard for the predominant avionics data bus used on most higher-end commercial and transport aircraft.


• ARINC 661 is not an academic document. It was at the basis of the Airbus A380 Cockpit GUI development, and is also seemingly used for other Airbus aircrafts. It is also used by Boeing, for example for the 787 development


• Last but not least, I am a member of the ARINC 661 committee

Stay connected and I hope that I will have time to draft the second part soon.