MILITARY & DEFENCE
How FACE Benefi ts Today’s Avionic Developers
Stephen DiCamillo, technical marketing and business development specialist at LDRA and Ian Ferguson, vice president of marketing and strategic alliances at Lynx Software Technologies explore The FACE Technical Standard
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In 2004, the United States Government started a large effort to defi ne and implement Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) as a requirement within military systems. Since then, we’ve seen a progression in policy guidance that raised the profi le of MOSA and its applicability. The FACE Technical Standard- as one of the named open standards endorsed by U.S. policy - was recently referred to by U.S. Army Brigadier General Rob Barrie as “integral to MOSA success by enabling modularity and promoting software reuse.” Programs such as the U.S. Army’s Future Vertical Lift call out the FACE Technical Standard as a requirement. In today’s digitised avionics, most of the functional capability is implemented in software. In fact, 70-90% of that functionality depends on software to control displays that create the human machine interface. Most of the development and upgrade costs for commercial and military systems are now dominated by that software. The reality is that software development is hard. Testing and safety certifying that software is hard. The need for greater functionality and adapting that software to new situations is constant. And the reality is that the old way of fi elding that software, which has traditionally taken years if not decades, now needs to be completed in weeks or days, if not hours. The FACE Consortium started its work in 2010 focused on developing an approach aimed at improving the portability, modularity, and reuse of software with the idea of reducing the cost and time to fi eld avionics capability.
FACE = Modularity and Portability The FACE Consortium identifi ed well-accepted standards that really mattered -existing standards such as POSIX and ARINC 653 for operating system interfaces, ARINC 661 and OpenGL for graphics interfaces, and so on. It also established a reference architecture to contain software components that conform to the FACE Technical Standard. The important aspect of that architecture was to abstract
10 NOVEMBER 2022 | ELECTRONICS TODAY
Figure 1: FACE architectural segments
the hardware away from those software components so those components now have more ability to be integrated into different systems.
By codifying a modular architecture, standard interfaces, data models, and conformance criteria into a common operating environment and reusable components, we now have the means to share capabilities not only across platforms, but also across the military services and avionics vendors as well. This approach of using open standards within military avionics systems promises to lower implementation costs, accelerate development, ensure robust
architecture and consistently high-quality software implementation, and maximise opportunities for reuse. The FACE Technical Standard embraces these ideals by providing a modular reference architecture based on segments that simplify the integration of software components intended to meet fi nal system requirements.
The content of each of those segments can and will vary depending on the preference of the system architect and the demands of the system under development. Despite those variations, modularity is ensured because the FACE Technical Standard defi nes the logical
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