Factual Information 2015:Appendix 1.6E/1.6E.12
This page contains an extract from MH370/01/15 Factual Information which accompanied the (first) Interim Statement released by The Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370 on 8th March 2015.
1.6E.12 Airplane Information Management System (AIMS)
The AIMS collects and calculates large quantities of data. The AIMS manages this data for several integrated avionics systems. These systems are the:
- Primary display system (PDS)
- Central maintenance computing system (CMCS)
- Airplane condition monitoring system (ACMS)
- Flight data recorder system (FDRS)
- Data communication management system (DCMS)
- Flight management computing system (FMCS)
- Thrust management computing system (TMCS)
The AIMS has software functions that do the calculation for each of these avionics systems. The AIMS supplies one other software function that many aircraft systems use. It is the data conversion gateway function (DCGF).
The AIMS has two cabinets which do the calculations for other avionic systems. These cabinets (Left AIMS Cabinet and Right AIMS Cabinet) are located in the Main Equipment Centre (MEC). To do these calculations, each AIMS cabinet has the following:
The IOMs and the CPMs are in the cabinet chassis. The chassis also has a backplane data bus and a backplane power bus to distribute data and power to the IOMs and CPMs. The input/output module (IOM) transfers data between the software functions in the AIMS CPMs and external signal sources. The CPMs supply the software and hardware to do the calculations for several avionic systems. The software is called functions. To keep a necessary separation between the functions, each function is partitioned. The partitions permit multiple functions to use the same hardware and be in the same CPM.
Source: Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370, 8 March 2015, Factual Information MH370/01/15
The Factual Information was updated in 2018 by the Safety Investigation Report MH370/01/2018 which added new content but did not include all of the previous data.