About AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference – Proceedings

AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference – Proceedings

What this record actually is

AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference – Proceedings is the published record of the Digital Avionics Systems Conference, shortened everywhere in its field to DASC. It is conference proceedings, not a journal. Once a year, engineers, researchers, regulators and manufacturers who build the digital electronic systems of aircraft and spacecraft — the avionics — meet to present reviewed papers on the design, verification, certification and operation of those systems, and the papers are published together as that year's proceedings, principally through the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, with the conference co-sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the IEEE. This record lists the proceedings' ISSNs as 2155-7209 and 2155-7195, its publisher as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., its country as the United States, and its focus as Engineering. Its stored citation indicators, an H-index of 44 and an SJR of 0.318 with no quartile stored, reflect a long-lived proceedings series in a field where the formal literature is dominated by conferences, standards and certification documents rather than by journals alone.

The conference is old by the standards of its technology. DASC's own official history records that the first DASC was held in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1975, when digital avionics was in its infancy and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics created the conference to provide a forum for technical interchange in the new field. The second followed in Los Angeles in 1977 and the third in Fort Worth in 1979, at which point AIAA shared financial and technical administration with the IEEE. The conference ran in alternate years until 1990, when attendance and the pace of technological change made it an annual event, held every fall in major cities across the United States and, in its modern international form, in Europe as well. The 42nd DASC was held in Barcelona, Spain, in October 2023; the 44th, in Montreal, Canada, in September 2025. A proceedings run that stretches unbroken from the first generations of digital flight systems to today's discussions of artificial intelligence in the cockpit is, in effect, a primary-source history of avionics itself.

This profile explains what digital avionics covers, how DASC is organised and governed, what its proceedings contain, how its modern editions are structured, how to use and cite the proceedings, how to read the metrics on this record, and who should attend, publish in and consult DASC.

Quick facts

Conference: Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC). Proceedings title as recorded here: AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference – Proceedings. Type: annual conference proceedings. ISSNs in this record: 2155-7209 and 2155-7195. Sponsorship and governance: offered by the Digital Avionics Technical Committee (DATC) and co-sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); within the IEEE, the Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS) is responsible for yearly conference oversight in partnership with the DATC, and within AIAA the DATC has overall supervisory authority and is aligned with AIAA's Information Systems Group. Publisher of the proceedings in this record: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. First held: Boston, 1975. Annual since 1990; held every fall. Stored indicators: H-index 44, SJR 0.318, no quartile stored.

Recent editions fix the modern scale and shape. The 42nd DASC, Barcelona, 1 to 5 October 2023, produced proceedings of about 1,908 pages in the print-on-demand edition. The 40th, in San Antonio, Texas, in October 2021, ran to about 1,590 pages, and the 41st, in Portsmouth, Virginia, in September 2022, to about 1,338 pages. The 44th DASC, Montreal, 14 to 18 September 2025, was built around two days of tutorials followed by three days of conference sessions, under the theme of avionics' responsibility for safe and sustainable next-generation aerospace operations. No acceptance rate, registration fee or proceedings price is given as a series property here: the commercial listings for individual editions price their print volumes per edition, and the official calls set their own dates and terms year by year, so any single figure would misrepresent a changing annual event.

History: from 1975 to an international annual conference

DASC's official history, maintained on its conference sites, tells a clean institutional story. In the early 1970s digital avionics — the replacement of analogue instruments and hard-wired systems by digital computers in aircraft — was a new field without a dedicated forum. AIAA created DASC to fill that gap, holding the first meeting in Boston in 1975 and the second in Los Angeles in 1977. At the third, in Fort Worth in 1979, AIAA chose to share financial and technical administration with the IEEE, whose members were equally central to the new technology, and the two societies formalised the arrangement in a written agreement. In 1988 AIAA stepped back from full ownership to become a co-sponsor, and ownership of the conference passed to the Digital Avionics Technical Committee. Within the IEEE, the Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society took responsibility for yearly oversight in partnership with that committee, an arrangement that continues: DATC works directly with AESS to organise the conference each year, and DATC holds supervisory authority on the AIAA side.

The rhythm changed in 1990. A biennial meeting could not keep pace with a technology then transforming cockpits, navigation, communications and flight management, so DASC became annual. Its official history list records the procession of host cities across the decades: among them Phoenix, Fort Worth, Seattle, Cambridge, Atlanta, Irvine, Bellevue, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Daytona Beach, Salt Lake City, St. Paul, Dallas, Portland, Washington DC, Orlando, Seattle again, Williamsburg, Syracuse, Colorado Springs, Sacramento and St. Petersburg. For its first forty years it was held within the United States; the executive committee then deliberately internationalised it, holding the 34th in Prague in 2015, the 37th in London in 2018, the 42nd in Barcelona in 2023 and the 44th in Montreal in 2025, recognising that its authors, attendees, manufacturers and regulators had long been global. The conference's own objectives, as stated in its history pages, are to provide a forum for the exchange of new knowledge in digital avionics among professionals and students in commercial, military and general aviation and in space applications, and to encourage, in an unclassified setting, the exchange of technical information between defence and civil sectors, with a balance between military and civil applications as a strategic goal.

What digital avionics covers

Avionics is the electronic systems of an aircraft or spacecraft: the systems that communicate, navigate, surveil, manage flight, display information to the crew, control systems automatically, record data, and increasingly, decide and act with varying degrees of autonomy. Digital avionics is that world rebuilt on software and networks, which is why DASC's concerns are as much about software engineering, verification and certification as about hardware. A modern airliner's avionics are a distributed, safety-critical computing system, certified to demanding standards, expected to operate for decades, and integrated with air traffic management, satellite navigation and communications infrastructure on a global scale.

The 44th DASC's track structure, published for the 2025 edition, is a good map of the field as the community itself divides it. Its tracks were Avionics Platforms; Cyber, Systems and Software Engineering; Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance and Information Networks; Air Traffic Management; Urban, Advanced Air Mobility and New Space; Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Uncrewed Spacecraft; Human Factors; and AI for Avionics, with poster papers alongside. The same edition's call elaborated the territory: integrated modular avionics and multicore partitioning for safety and security; surveillance and collision avoidance, synthetic vision and sensing; navigation systems and performance-based navigation; communications systems and networks; model-based development and digital twins; systems engineering and programme management; software development and test certification under DO-178 and environmental qualification under DO-160; system safety and cybersecurity; autonomous systems; human-machine interface, mode awareness, trust in automation, flight deck design, crew coordination and pilot training; and the emerging operations of urban air mobility, unmanned traffic and new spaceflight. The 2025 theme pressed a further question across all of it: that avionics must deliver greater customisation, autonomy, greener operation and faster adaptability, with reduced carbon footprint, higher computing power, lower latency and greater flexibility, while maintaining safety and security and shortening certification time.

The proceedings as a record

Each year's proceedings gather the edition's accepted papers, organised by the edition's tracks and sessions, and are published through the IEEE, the publisher named in this record; individual editions also appear in print-on-demand form with their own ISBNs and page counts, as the commercial proceedings listings for the 2021, 2022 and 2023 editions show. Papers are individually authored and individually citable, in the standard form for IEEE conference papers, with the conference name, year, place and dates forming part of the citation. The series ISSNs in this record, 2155-7209 and 2155-7195, are the continuing identity under which libraries and indexing systems gather the successive annual volumes, distinguishing the series from the per-edition ISBNs.

For researchers, the proceedings have a particular evidentiary status in this field. Avionics knowledge lives in standards, certification guidance and conference papers to an unusual degree, because the community that builds certified systems publishes its methods and experience where its peers, including regulators and standards participants, actually meet. A DASC paper may be the public record of how a verification technique performed on a real programme, how a human-factors problem was measured in a real cockpit context, or how a navigation or surveillance concept behaved under realistic conditions. Such papers should still be read critically, as conference papers rather than as certification evidence: a DASC paper is a reviewed contribution to a technical conversation, not a finding by a regulator, and claims that matter for safety must be traced onward into the standards and approved data themselves.

Taking part: authors, attendees and the annual cycle

Participation follows the annual conference cycle. The call for papers for an edition sets abstract, acceptance, full paper and camera-ready deadlines — for the 44th DASC those ran from an abstract deadline in February 2025 through a full paper deadline in May and a camera-ready deadline at the end of June, ahead of the September conference — and it defines the tracks to which authors submit. Accepted authors present at the meeting, which combines the technical sessions with panel sessions, exhibits and product demonstrations from avionics industries and institutions, professional education tutorials offering continuing education units through the IEEE, and, from 2025, the possibility of proposing panel sessions that fit a field of interest. Authors preparing for a future edition should work only from that edition's own call: themes, tracks, deadlines and formats are reset each year by that year's chairs and committees, and figures such as page limits or fees from a previous year are not a property of the series.

The audience is deliberately mixed. Alongside university researchers sit engineers from airframe and avionics manufacturers, from airlines and operators, from air navigation service providers, and from the research establishments and agencies that shape standards, such as the bodies whose work the IEEE AESS community supports across international avionics standardisation. That mixture is the conference's point, stated in its own objectives: professionals and students, civil and military, exchanging new knowledge in the open. A student paper and a manufacturer's programme experience report can appear in the same proceedings, and both are part of how the field transmits what it knows.

Reading the metrics on this record

The H-index of 44 and SJR of 0.318 stored in this record are plausible, modest figures for a specialist engineering proceedings series, and they should be interpreted within the conventions of the field. Avionics is a comparatively small, professionally concentrated discipline; its papers are cited by a limited community, often over long periods, because certified systems remain in service for decades and the literature that describes their techniques remains relevant with them. Citation databases also cover IEEE conference literature well in principle but attribute citations to proceedings series imperfectly across decades of changing titles and formats, from the early AIAA/IEEE/SAE-era volumes to the modern IEEE/AIAA form of the conference name.

The right judgements about DASC do not come from these indicators. They come from its longevity since 1975, its sponsorship by the field's two principal professional societies, the oversight of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, the recorded scale of its recent editions, running to well over a thousand pages of reviewed papers a year, and its role as the venue its organisers describe, in the 44th edition's call, as the preeminent research and development conference in digital avionics. A researcher deciding whether to submit, or a reader deciding how much weight to give a DASC paper, should look at the paper's own authors, institution, evidence and subsequent citation and standardisation history, in that order.

Who should use these proceedings

Avionics engineers and systems engineers will find here the field's working literature on platforms, software, safety, security and integration. Human-factors specialists will find one of the few continuing venues where cockpit automation, display and crew issues are treated as first-class engineering subjects. Specialists in communications, navigation and surveillance, and in air traffic management, will find DASC one of the places where airborne and ground systems are discussed together. Researchers in autonomy and artificial intelligence for aviation will find its AI for Avionics work grounded in certification reality, which usefully disciplines speculation. Students entering aerospace engineering can read recent proceedings as a map of what the industry actually works on, and historians of technology can read the run from 1975 onward as a record of the digital transformation of flight.

Librarians should catalogue the series under both ISSNs and under the conference's name in its varying forms, since papers are cited as AIAA/IEEE, IEEE/AIAA and, in early years, with additional society names attached. Searchers should combine the conference acronym DASC with the year and the subject term, because edition-level records are dispersed across the IEEE's digital library, commercial proceedings sellers and university repositories. Anyone citing a paper for a safety-relevant claim should also record the edition and track, which locate the paper in the community's own organisation of the field at that date.

How an edition is put together

Each edition is assembled by that year's general and technical programme chairs, working with track chairs who own the review and session-building for their subject areas — the 2025 programme, for example, named paired track chairs from universities, research centres and manufacturers for every track from avionics platforms to artificial intelligence. That structure explains the proceedings' consistency across decades: the names change, but the pattern of an edition — a theme, a set of tracks reflecting the field's current division of labour, reviewed papers gathered into sessions, tutorials before the main days, panels and exhibits alongside — repeats. It also explains why the proceedings must always be read by edition. A paper's track, session and year tell a reader which conversation it belonged to, which standards environment it assumed, and which generation of aircraft systems it addressed, all of which matter in a field where technology baselines are defined by certification dates as much as by publication dates.

Frequently asked questions

Is DASC a journal? No. It is an annual conference, first held in 1975; this record covers its published proceedings, issued through the IEEE with AIAA and IEEE co-sponsorship.

Who runs DASC? The Digital Avionics Technical Committee owns and supervises the conference on the AIAA side, and the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society is responsible for yearly oversight within the IEEE, working in partnership with the committee.

How often and where is it held? Annually, every fall, since 1990; before that in alternate years. It was long held across the United States and is now regularly international, including Prague in 2015, London in 2018, Barcelona in 2023 and Montreal in 2025.

What are its ISSNs? This record lists 2155-7209 and 2155-7195 for the proceedings series. Individual editions also carry their own ISBNs.

What subjects does it cover? Avionics platforms; cyber, systems and software engineering; communications, navigation and surveillance; air traffic management; advanced air mobility and new space; unmanned systems; human factors; and artificial intelligence for avionics, as set out in the 44th edition's tracks.

How do I cite a DASC paper? Cite the authors, paper title, the conference name in its AIAA/IEEE form, the year, the place and dates where your style requires them, the pages, the IEEE as publisher, and the DOI where the digital edition provides one.

Sources and verification

This profile is based on DASC's own official conference history and objectives pages, which give its 1975 Boston origin, the 1979 joint AIAA and IEEE administration, the 1988 ownership change, the roles of the Digital Avionics Technical Committee and the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, and the move to annual meetings in 1990; on the official call for papers and programme material for the 44th DASC in Montreal in 2025, which give its theme, tracks, topic lists and deadlines; on the IEEE AESS announcement of that edition; on proceedings listings for the 2021 to 2023 editions, which give their dates, places, publishers and page counts; and on the ISSNs, publisher and citation indicators stored in this Journals World record, reported here as stored values. No acceptance rate or fee is stated, because none is published as a property of the series.