ARINC661 CDS

A Cockpit Display System (or CDS), as defined in the ARINC 661 standard, is an ARINC 661 graphic Server, constituted of a kernel which is able to create the GUI hierarchy specified in configuration Files called Definition Files during initialization, thus not needing to be recompiled if the GUI definition changes. The Cockpit Display System can be seen as the view in the Model-View-Controller pattern.


The Cockpit Display System is often abbreviated as CDS or more simply as Server. The J661 project provides a generic Cockpit Display System called the J661 Server.

Design-time phase

The design-time phase correspond to the initialization of the CDS and the creation of the initial state of the widgets for the Definition Files.

Runtime phase

The runtime phase correspond to:

• Communication Server => UA: The interpretation of pilot actions and the sending the associated events to the ARINC661 UA
• Communication UA => Server: The reception of UA messages and the update of the diplay

Note that a CDS as specified in the ARINC 661 standard is event-driven.