Empirical investigations on avionics scaling laws

This article presents an empirical study deriving quantitative relations between vehicle properties and avionics systems. Existing optimization methods are used to calculate the optimal avionics systems for a great number of vehicles as well as common avionics platforms. A set of basic and easy-to-determine vehicle properties is suggested, which characterize the vehicle and drive the avionics system. For instance number of I/Os and their spatial extent. Vehicles are classified by their basic properties, optimized and the results are analyzed such that the effect of each individual characteristic vehicle property and the resulting weight for different avionics platforms becomes quantifiable. By interpolation simple mathematical equations are derived, which relate arbitrary values of characteristic vehicle properties with the weight of avionics platforms, so called scaling laws.