DIANA aims at contributing to the definition and standardization of the development and certification means needed to support this novel platform. The technological guidelines driving the development of AIDA are: to base AIDA development on IME/IMA concepts, to enable the execution of object oriented applications over virtual machines on avionics platforms, to provide services supporting secure distribution (e.g. RT CORBA) for avionics applications, and: to define AIDA development means, based on the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, the introduction of the DIANA concepts is expected to bring a significant development cost and time reduction when compared to the situation where each aircraft electronic program has to develop a set of specific hardware and software. The usage of very promising technologies, such as CORBA and JAVA implementations in real time environment, and the update of standards will provide new opportunities to create the future IME architectures for the next generation of aircraft.