Recently the integrated modular avionics (IMA) architecture which introduces the concept of resource partitioning becomes popular as an alternative to the traditional federated architecture. A novel hierarchical approach is proposed to solve the resource allocation problem for IMA systems in distributed environments. Firstly, the worst case response time of tasks with arbitrary deadlines is analyzed for the two-level scheduler. Then, the hierarchical resource allocation approach is presented in two levels. At the platform level, a task assignment algorithm based on genetic simulated annealing (GSA) is proposed to assign a set of pre-defined tasks to different processing nodes in the form of task groups, so that resources can be allocated as partitions and mapped to task groups. While yielding to all the resource constraints, the algorithm tries to find an optimal task assignment with minimized communication costs and balanced work load. At the node level, partition parameters are optimized, so that the computational resource can be allocated further. An example is shown to illustrate the hierarchal resource allocation approach and manifest the validity. Simulation results comparing the performance of the proposed GSA with that of traditional genetic algorithms are presented in the context of task assignment in IMA systems.